Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/134

 116 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. upon a table. The nurse, in the mean time, re- turns, and, hearing the sad tidings, proceeds sor- rowfully to the cliamber of death ; but on removing the sheet, and looking at the countenance, thinks she can perceive some faint signs of life remain- ing, and having replaced the extended body in bed, recals, by some means or other, the apparently dead man to life, and in a fev/ days sees him re- stored to perfect health. Few, liovv^ever, of his contemporaries approved of the practice of Sydenham, though he himself was so convinced of its propriety, that he con- cludes his original treatise upon this disease, by declaring, that if his young son William, whose welfare and life were dearer to him than the wealth of the Indies, were to be seized with the small-pox, he should direct him to be treated in the same manner. The new method, as it was called, had indeed the sanction of the illustrious Locke, himself a physician ; but the generality of the practitioners of that day continued to trudge on in the an- cient course of their forefathers. Radclifle was free from the bigotry and prejudices of his bre- thren ; and one of the first-fruits which he reaped from his early determination to leave the trammels of authority, and w illingly admit the light of recent discovery, w^as the most remarkable success of his practice in this very disease, in which he strictly followed the precepts laid down by Syden- ham. The small-pox was raging in the city and in the neighbourhood of Oxford, with great fa- tality ; and instead of stoviug up his patients as. was done by other practitioners, RadclifCe em-