Page:The Hunterian Oration 1839.djvu/23

16 THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. Our historical records do not indicate that the discovery of the Circulation was immediately succeeded by striking improvements in the practical departments of medicine and surgery. More of the groundwork was yet wanting in the knowledge and comprehensive views of the Animal Economy, from which the advances of medicine in modern times have emanated. The researches of Harvey in two great subjects of Physiology, the Circulation of the Blood, and Generation, had no decided effect, it would appear on the sagacious mind of Sydenham, who flourished in the immediately succeeding period, for we do not find that in his writings, he enforced the study of anatomy and physiology, nor does he specify this study when propounding the ways of improving physic. Probably, however, it was for the reason that Sydenham, strongly impressed with the error of his time in interweaving philosophical speculations with the histories of disease, thought, that he could render the best service to medicine by proceeding upon the model of the Father of Physic, the never enough extolled Hippocrates, as he styles him, to collect and record accurate histories of disease, free from preconceived opinions, inculcating that, ‘ although there are varieties in the symptoms of disease, yet Nature acts in so orderly a manner that the same disease appears with the like symptoms in different persons, so that the symptoms observed in Socrates in his illness, may be applied to another person afflicted with the �