The Revival and Refinement of Hippocratic Ideas

Abstract

Eighteenth-century physicians admired their seventeenth-century colleague Thomas Sydenham, ‘the English Hippocrates’, because Sydenham’s work and reputation seemed so rich in inspiration. Sydenham had recommended the compilation of case histories, which contributed significantly to the eighteenth-century effort to classify diseases. Sydenham had urged the importance of clinical observation at a time when most physicians relied on a Galenic and humoural theory of disease and considered it more important to attain a proper theoretical understanding of illness and health than to draw inferences from clinical experience. Sydenham thus seemed to have anticipated another eighteenth-century interest, one often identified with the Dutch physician Boerhaave, in clinical observation. To Sydenham aetiology was less interesting than therapy. He turned away from the microscope, from dissection, and from counting and measuring, and focused instead on finding ways to identify effective remedies. To the eighteenth-century physician, under attack for the failure of therapy, Sydenham seemed to have foreseen the need for an efficacious medicine. And Sydenham seemed to his successors to have revived the Hippocratic idea that the seeds of disease lie both within and outside the body — that disease, especially when large numbers of people are affected, finds its origins in man’s habitat.

Observations of this Kind, when regularly made for a long Series of Years, in one and the same Place, more certainly discover the Constitution of the Atmosphere in that Country, the reigning Disorders, their Successions, Relations one to another, and even the very Method of Cure.

Huxham

But tho’ abstinence from Air is not, the Sort of Air which they use, is in the Power of a great many people: And as the Choice of Air is a Subject about which a Physician’s Advice is often demanded, its Nature and different Qualities is a proper one of his studies.¹

Arbuthnot