Sydenham

“Sydenham’s therapies consisted of a carefully regulated diet, fresh air in the sick room, abundant liquids, cooling drinks for fever, iron for anemia, mercurial inunctions for syphilis, horseback riding for patients with tuberculosis to provide fresh air and exercise, his own laudman preparation for heart ailments, powdered deer horn (a form of lime) for dysentery, and chinchona bark for malaria” (Bloch). Re disease causation, Sydenham moved away from humoral theory, with its emphasis on bleeding and purging, to understanding of disease as coming from outside the body. His observational/empirical approach, with the naturalistic classification it led to, moved away from individual (humoral) predilections for diseases (location, time of year, alignment of the stars) to individual diseases as multi-symptomatic entities, each with its own naturalistic history of stages (qua Locke), with each disease conceptually and empirically distinguishable from other diseases. It’s not that Sydenham rejected causation per se, but that he rejected it as anchorage for understanding disease and arriving at effective treatments. Rather than beginning with first principles (Aristotelian forms, the four elements, Galenian humors, etc.), he began with observation of a disease in all its singularity, charted its natural history, and then repeated such detailed observation on multiple cases, ending up with the type of low-level generalizations that best suited medicine’s curative potentia. In this manner, medicine could be empirical without denying its rationalistic foundations (King, 1-6).