Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/472

 nature—such, for example, as pleurisy, pneumonia, rheumatism, erysipelas, scarlet fever, etc. It is well-nigh impossible for us moderns to comprehend how so practical and clear-headed a man as Sydenham could have formulated such a purely hypothetical pathology, a doctrine so completely lacking in anything like a solid foundation of fact.

Sydenham excelled in the description of the clinical manifestations of certain diseases, as, for example, small-*pox, hysterical affections, the encystment of a renal calculus, and the gout—a disease from which, as already stated, he was a very frequent sufferer throughout a large portion of his life. All his published works are in the Latin language, but translations have been made into English, French, German, Flemish and Italian. At All Souls College, Oxford, where Sydenham spent eight years of his life, it was a fixed rule that all its members should habitually converse and write in Latin.

Sydenham's remarks upon liquid laudanum are worth recording:—

Of all the remedies which a kind Providence has bestowed upon mankind for the purpose of lightening its miseries there is not one which equals opium in its power to moderate the violence of so many maladies and even to cure some of them Medicine would be a one-arm man if it did not possess this remedy Laudanum is the best of all the cordials; indeed, it is the only genuine cordial that we possess to-day. [This was written in the middle of the seventeenth century.]

The laudanum employed by Sydenham was made according to the following formula: Spanish wine, 400 grammes; Opium, 62 grammes; Saffron, 31 grammes; Powder of Canella and Powder of Clove, of each 4 grammes.

After much suffering and extreme weakness, Sydenham died on December 31, 1689.

Andrew Browne, the Scotch physician of whom mention has already been made on an earlier page, makes the following comments on the closing days of Sydenham's career: "It is a difficult matter to believe, and yet it is the truth: This great physician, who throughout his life