Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/468

 *scribing drugs in a very great variety of combinations (polypharmacy).

The iatrochemists, attaching small importance to simple dietetic measures, prescribed without stint all the most active substances belonging to the mineral kingdom and all the new remedies which the chemists had evolved from their furnaces.

Finally, the iatrophysicists directed their efforts to the removal or diminution of all bodily conditions that appeared to act as mechanical hindrances to health.

Sydenham, who possessed a rare degree of common sense, cast aside all these hypotheses, disregarded the prevailing routine methods of treatment, and refused to accept the therapeutic novelties of the day. "Nature is to be my guide," he declared, and from that time forward he studied disease at the bedside, and watched carefully, and with a mind free from prejudice, the effects of the remedies which he employed. Thus, pursuing the methods advocated by the great master Hippocrates, he was able to place his medical brethren once more on the pathway which leads to an increase in knowledge of the healing art. Practical medicine, which had previously been falling into an almost moribund condition, was by his efforts made again a living and growing science. That Sydenham had a perfectly clear conception of what was needed at that time to renew the vitality of the medical profession of England is plainly shown by the following statement which he makes in the dedication of one of his writings to Dr. Mapletoft:—

After studying medicine for a few years at the University of Oxford, I returned to London and entered upon the practice of my profession. As I devoted myself with all possible zeal to the work in hand it was not long before I realized thoroughly that the best way of increasing one's knowledge of medicine is to begin applying, in actual practice, such principles as one may already have acquired; and thus I became convinced that the physician