Page:The rise of physiology in England - the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th, 1895 (IA b24974778).pdf/44

 sented themselves to him, keeping the peculiar and constant phenomena apart from the ac- cidental and adventitious, and laying aside all hypotheses as to their nature, which enabled Sydenham to draw up those pictures of gout, dropsy, and fever which will remain classical for all time, and justly entitle him to be called the modern Hippocrates. From Ilarvey's phy- siological teaching, and from clinical observa- tions carried on in the spirit of Sydenham, our present knowledge of disease became possible. Harvey's work and writings had no direct influence on Sydenham; the latter makes no reference anywhere to Harvey, nor does he seem, in his treatise on Dropsy, written in 1683, to have seen the bearing which Lower's ex- periments, made fourteen years previously, of ligature of the veins, had on dropsy. (a) Sydenham considered "weakness of the blood to be the sole cause of dropsy, and throughout his writings he nowhere alludes to the phy- siology of the tissues. He quotes Hippocrates with approval, as blaming those who in their exceeding curiosity and officiousness busied themselves in speculations on the human frame; and whilst admitting that more than one