Thomas Sydenham (1688). Oil on canvas. 76 x 61. Thomas Sydenham was an English physician. He was born at Wynford Eagle in Dorset, where his father was a gentleman of property. His brother was Colonel William Sydenham. Thomas fought for the Parliament throughout the English Civil War, and, at its end, resumed his medical studies at Oxford. He became the undisputed master of the English medical world and was known as 'The English Hippocrates '. Among his many achievements was the discovery of a disease, Sydenham's Chorea, also known as St Vitus Dance. At the age of eighteen Sydenham was entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; after a short period his college studies appear to have been interrupted, and he served for a time as an officer in the Parliamentarian army during the Civil War. He completed his Oxford course in 1648, graduating as bachelor of medicine, and about the same time he was elected a fellow of All Souls College. It was not until nearly thirty years later that he graduated as M.D., not at Oxford, but at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where his eldest son was by then an undergraduate. After 1648 he seems to have spent some time studying medicine at Oxford, but he was soon back in military service, and in 1654 he received the sum of E600, as a result of a petition he addressed to Oliver Cromwell, pointing out the various arrears due to two of his brothers who had been killed and reminding Cromwell that he himself had also faithfully served the parliament with the loss of much blood. In 1655 he resigned his fellowship at All Souls and married. In 1663 he passed the examinations of the College of Physicians for their licence to practice in Westminster and 6 miles round; but it is probable that he had been settled in London for some time before that. This minimum qualification to practice was the single bond between Sydenham and the College of Physicians throughout the whole of his career. He seems to have been distrusted by some members of the faculty because he was an innovator and something of a plain-dealer. In a letter to John Mapletoft he refers to a class of detractors qui vitio statim vertunt si quis novi aliquid, ab illis non prius dictum vel etiam inauditum, in medium proferat; and in a letter to Robert Boyle, written the year before his death, he says, I have the happiness of curing my patients, at least of having it said concerning me that few miscarry under me; but cannot brag of my correspondency with some other of my faculty. Though yet, in taken fire at my attempts to reduce practice to a greater easiness, plainness, and in the meantime letting the mountebank at Charing Cross pass unrailed at, they contradict themselves, and would make the world believe I may prove more considerable than they would have me. Sydenham attracted to him in warm friendship some of the most discriminating men of his time, such as Boyle and John Locke. Like them, he was a Christian. His first book, Methodus curandi febres, was published in 1666; a second edition, with an additional chapter on the plague, in 1668; and a third edition, further enlarged and bearing the better-known title of Observationes medicinae, in 1676. His next publication was in 1680 in the form of two Epistolae responsoriae, the one, On Epidemics, addressed to Robert Brady, regius professor of physic at Cambridge, and the other On the Lues venerea, to Henry Paman, public orator at Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Physic in London. In 1682 he published another Dissertatio epistolaris, on the treatment of confluent smallpox and on hysteria, addressed to Dr William Cole of Worcester. The Tractatus de podagra et hydrope came out in 1683, and the Schedula monitoria de novae febris ingressu in 1686. His last completed work, Processus integri, is an outline sketch of pathology and practice; twenty copies of it were printed in 1692, and, being a compendium, it has been more often republished both in England and in other countries than any other of his writings separately. A fragment on pulmonary consumption was found among his papers. His collected writings occupy about 600 pages 8vo, in the Latin, though whether that or English was the language in which they were originally written is disputed. Although Sydenham was a highly successful practitioner and witnessed, besides foreign reprints, more than one new edition of his various tractates called for in his lifetime, his fame as the father of English medicine, or the English Hippocrates, was posthumous. For a long time he was held in vague esteem for the success of his cooling treatment of small-pox, for his laudanum, and for his advocacy of the use of Peruvian bark in quartan agues, in modern terms, the use of quinine-containing cinchona bark for treatment of malaria caused by Plasmodium malariae. There were, however, those amon