Thomas Sydenham: Life and Times

Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) was an English country gentleman’s son who fought for Parliament in the Civil War, took a medical degree almost by accident of politics, and spent the rest of his life practising medicine in Westminster. He held no great office, never became a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and wrote his books in Latin for a small learned audience. Yet within a few generations he was being called “the English Hippocrates”, and his descriptions of fevers, gout and childhood chorea are still read by physicians today.

This page tells the story of the man and his century: the Dorset family, the interrupted years at Oxford, the fellowship at All Souls and the irregular degree of 1648, the London practice and the College licence of 1663, the friendship with the philosopher John Locke, the books he published between 1666 and 1686, his own long illness with gout and kidney stone, the praise and the abuse he received in his lifetime, and his death in Pall Mall at the end of 1689. The medicines he became famous for — his liquid laudanum and the Peruvian bark — and his methods of describing disease are only named here; each has its own page in this wing.

Table of Contents

  1. A Dorset Family in a Divided England
  2. Oxford Interrupted: The Civil War Years
  3. All Souls and the Bachelor of Medicine (1648)
  4. Westminster Practice and the College Licence (1663)
  5. John Locke at the Bedside
  6. The Books, 1666 to 1686
  7. A Physician with Gout and Stone
  8. Praise and Blame in His Own Time
  9. Death in Pall Mall (1689) and the Memorial at St James’s
  10. Why He Was Called the English Hippocrates
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Dorset Family in a Divided England

Sydenham was born in September 1624 at Wynford Eagle, a small village in Dorset in the south-west of England. Most modern accounts give the date as 10 September. His family belonged to the Dorset gentry — landowners of local standing rather than great nobles — and they were firmly on one side of the quarrel that was about to tear the country apart. His brother William Sydenham rose to be a colonel in the Parliamentary army.

The year of his birth matters for the story. He was a teenager when the long dispute between King Charles I and Parliament over taxes, religion and royal power turned into open war in 1642. For a young man of a Parliamentarian family, the war would decide where he studied, which posts were open to him and, in the end, which profession he followed.

A note on the birth year

The Victorian edition of his works, translated for the Sydenham Society and published with a Life by Robert Gordon Latham in 1848, prints his birth year as 1634 in one place. That figure is contradicted in the same volume by the inscription on his memorial tablet, which records that he was born in 1624 and lived 65 years, and every other source agrees on 1624. It is best read as a slip in that edition.

The family paid a price for its loyalty to Parliament. In 1654 Oliver Cromwell’s government paid Thomas £600 for arrears that had been owed to brothers of his who had died, according to the standard modern biographical summaries. The Civil War, in other words, was not a background event for the Sydenhams; it ran through the household.

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2. Oxford Interrupted: The Civil War Years

Sydenham went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford — in 1642, according to the neurologist and historian J. M. S. Pearce. He can hardly have chosen a worse moment. Oxford became the King’s headquarters during the war, a Royalist town full of soldiers and courtiers, and it was no place for the son of a Parliamentarian family to sit quietly over his books.

His studies broke off, and he served as an officer on the Parliament side. The details of his military service are thin in the surviving record; the modern summaries agree on the essential point that he was a soldier before he became a physician. A South African historical review of his life, by A. W. Sloan, opens with exactly that observation: the leading English physician of the later seventeenth century had first been a soldier.

When the Royalist garrison of Oxford surrendered in 1646 and the university passed under Parliament’s control, Sydenham went back. The seventeenth-century Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, quoted by Latham, says that he “returned again to Magdalen Hall”. The world he returned to was very different from the one he had left: Parliament was now purging the colleges of men loyal to the King, and places were opening up for those on the winning side.

Why the war shaped his medicine

Historians of Sydenham often point out that he came to medicine late and from outside the usual path. He had not spent years in the lecture halls absorbing the classical medical authorities before the war began. Sloan’s review stresses that he came to believe medicine was learned by watching patients rather than by reading books. Whether that conviction began in the disruptions of the 1640s cannot be proved, but his unusual route into the profession is part of every account of him.

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3. All Souls and the Bachelor of Medicine (1648)

The Parliamentary purge of Oxford gave Sydenham his opening. He was elected a Fellow of All Souls College — in Latham’s words, “in place of an expelled Royalist”. A fellowship meant an income, rooms and a recognised place in the university, and it allowed a young man without a degree to settle down to study.

On 14 April 1648 he was made Bachelor of Medicine. The degree was taken, as Latham puts it, “irregularly, i.e. without having taken a degree in Arts first”. In normal times an Oxford medical degree followed years of study in the arts course; in the unsettled years after the war, men with the right political credentials could be passed through more quickly. Sydenham’s critics later made something of this, and his admirers made something of the opposite: that he owed little to the schools and much to his own observation.

The Montpellier tradition

Some biographies say that Sydenham went to study at Montpellier, in the south of France, then one of the most famous medical schools in Europe. The story rests only on the authority of a later writer named Desault, whom Latham cites, and Latham himself treats it with doubt, introducing it with the words “If he did so…”. No document from Sydenham’s own time confirms the visit. It is best treated as an unconfirmed tradition.

Leaving Oxford

In 1655 he resigned his All Souls fellowship and married Mary Gee. The couple had sons, William and Henry. Fellows of Oxford colleges were expected to be unmarried, so the marriage and the resignation went together; it also marked the moment when Sydenham turned from university life to earning his living as a practising physician.

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4. Westminster Practice and the College Licence (1663)

Sydenham set up in practice in Westminster, the part of London around Parliament and the royal court. Latham, who examined the evidence carefully, concluded that he was settled there “certainly before the year 1661; probably several years before”. From 1661 onward he kept year-by-year notes on the fevers and epidemics of London, which later became the backbone of his books. He lived for many years in Pall Mall, where he died.

The licence of the College of Physicians

To practise physic lawfully in London, a physician needed the approval of the College of Physicians. The College had two main grades: its Fellows, a small governing body, and its Licentiates, who were permitted to practise but had no share in running the College. Sydenham sat the College’s examinations three times in the spring of 1663 — on 21 April, 8 May and 5 June — and on 25 June 1663 he was admitted a Licentiate.

He never became a Fellow. The man later honoured as the greatest English physician of his age remained, in the College’s own ranks, an outsider. The College’s records show the licence and nothing more.

A Cambridge doctorate at last

Only in 1676, when he was past fifty and already well known, did Sydenham take the full degree of Doctor of Medicine — not at Oxford but at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Latham quotes the Cambridge entry, dated 17 May 1676. By then his first major book had been in print for a decade, and the third edition, retitled Observationes medicae, appeared the same year.

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5. John Locke at the Bedside

Among Sydenham’s friends was John Locke (1632–1704), now remembered as one of the founders of modern philosophy and political thought. Locke had trained in medicine at Oxford, and for a time he worked closely with Sydenham, accompanying him on his visits to patients. The two men shared a distrust of grand theories and a belief that knowledge comes from careful experience.

The historian Kenneth Dewhurst, who studied the medical papers of this circle, published Sydenham’s original treatise on smallpox in 1959 together with a preface and a dedication to the Earl of Shaftesbury written by Locke — evidence of how closely the two worked on Sydenham’s writings. G. G. Meynell later examined Locke’s part in the famous preface to Observationes medicae (1676), the passage in which Sydenham argues that diseases are to be sorted into species as carefully as botanists sort plants. How much of that preface is Sydenham’s and how much Locke’s is a question historians still discuss.

Robert Boyle and the Oxford circle

The chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691), famous for his work on gases and his advocacy of experiment, was an early supporter. Sydenham dedicated his first book, the Methodus curandi febres of 1666, to Boyle. Dewhurst grouped Sydenham with three other Oxford-trained physicians of the period — Thomas Willis, Locke and Richard Lower — in a 1963 paper titled “An Oxford medical quartet”. Willis and Lower were anatomists and experimenters; Sydenham was the bedside observer of the group.

These friendships place Sydenham in the wider movement of the seventeenth century that put observation and experiment ahead of inherited authority — the movement that produced the Royal Society in 1660.

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6. The Books, 1666 to 1686

Sydenham wrote in Latin, the international language of learning, and his works appeared over twenty years. They were translated into English after his death and collected by the Sydenham Society in the 1840s.

What runs through all of them is the same approach: a year-by-year record of what he saw in his London patients, careful description of how each disease began, developed and ended, and an account of which remedies seemed to help. In these books he praised opium and gave the recipe of his liquid laudanum (see Sydenham’s Laudanum), moved from caution to strong confidence in the Peruvian bark for agues (see The Jesuits’ Bark), and set out the method of describing diseases as distinct species (see Bedside Observation).

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7. A Physician with Gout and Stone

Sydenham’s most famous description of a disease is of one he suffered himself. His gout began around 1649, when he was in his mid-twenties. Writing in 1679, in Latin that Latham quotes, he said he had endured gout for about thirty years, and stone as well. In the 1683 Treatise on Gout he described himself as “a man like myself, who has suffered from it thirty-four years”.

The treatise contains an account of an attack that reads like a patient’s diary. In the Latham translation: “About two o’clock in the morning he is awakened by a severe pain in the great toe; more rarely in the heel, ankle, or instep. This pain is like that of a dislocation…” The painful part, he wrote, “cannot bear the weight of the bedclothes nor the jar of a person walking in the room.” Generations of doctors have recognised the picture; a short 2004 item in the Journal of Clinical Rheumatology by B. B. Dorwart, titled “Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), on gout: 1717”, returned to his account.

Gout was an ancient disease long before Sydenham — the review by G. Nuki and P. A. Simkin traces it back to the Egyptians and to Hippocrates, and recounts its old reputation as the “disease of kings”. What Sydenham added was the view from inside the patient. Its cause, crystals of uric acid in the joint, was identified only in 1961; that story is told on the Bedside Observation page and on the site’s Gout history page.

The trembling hand

By 1683 his illness was affecting his work. In the dedication of the gout treatise he wrote that his “hand trembles too much to hold the pen”, and he thanked John Drake, a Bachelor of Medicine of Christ’s College, Cambridge, for helping him. He also suffered from stone in the kidney, the condition that, together with gout, would end his life (see the site’s Kidney Stones history page for how the disease was understood over the centuries).

His personal experience also coloured his judgement of the treatments of his day. In the gout treatise he wrote, in Latham’s translation: “I confidently affirm that the greater part of those who are supposed to have died of gout, have died of the medicine rather than the disease — a statement in which I am supported by observation.”

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8. Praise and Blame in His Own Time

Sydenham was not a universally admired figure while he lived. Latham summed up his contemporary reputation in one phrase: “his praise, or blame, was in extremes”. Some of his contemporaries, Latham records, called him “either divine or the rival of Hippocrates”. Others were scathing; Latham notes that the physician and naturalist Martin Lister called him a “miserable quack”.

Several things made him a target. He came into medicine through a wartime degree rather than the full course of the schools. He was an outsider to the College of Physicians’ inner circle. He openly preferred what he had seen at the bedside to the theories of the learned, and he challenged accepted practice — most famously in smallpox, where he kept patients cool and out of bed for part of the day at a time when the usual treatment was to heat them under heavy covers.

What he was known for

Latham observed that the brief biographies of Sydenham current in his own day said he “was famous for (a) his laudanum, (b) his cooling treatment of the smallpox, and (c) his administration of the Peruvian bark in agues.” Two of those three are natural medicines — a tincture of opium from the poppy, and the powdered bark of the South American cinchona tree — and each has its own page in this wing.

A practice of his century

For all his reputation as a reformer, much of Sydenham’s treatment was traditional for the seventeenth century. Sloan’s review notes that his treatment was largely traditional, and his own writings show that he bled and purged his patients, as nearly every physician of the age did, even in conditions such as childhood chorea. His originality lay less in the remedies he used than in the care with which he observed and recorded what happened to his patients. Historians such as Lester King have written about the balance in his works between empiricism — learning from experience — and the rational theory he claimed to distrust.

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9. Death in Pall Mall (1689) and the Memorial at St James’s

Thomas Sydenham died at his house in Pall Mall on 29 December 1689, aged 65. Latham describes the end of a long illness: years of gout, and “a renal calculus, which caused copious haematuria” — a kidney stone that caused heavy bleeding into the urine. Pearce, writing in 2020, interprets this in modern terms as kidney failure following gout’s effects on the kidney; that is a present-day reading of a seventeenth-century record, not a diagnosis made at the time.

He was buried in St James’s Church, Westminster, on Piccadilly, close to where he had lived and practised. In 1810 the College of Physicians — the body that had never made him a Fellow — placed a mural tablet in the church in his honour. Its Latin inscription records that he was born in 1624 and lived 65 years (“NATUS ERAT A.D. 1624 · VIXIT ANNOS 65”) and calls him “MEDICUS IN OMNE AEVUM NOBILIS” — roughly, “a physician renowned for all time”.

The Sydenham Society and later honours

In the nineteenth century his name was given to the Sydenham Society, founded in 1843 to publish translations of the classics of medicine; its two-volume English edition of his own works, with Latham’s Life, appeared in 1848 and 1850. A successor, the New Sydenham Society, carried on the work from the late 1850s into the early twentieth century. Pearce also records a statue of Sydenham at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, in the city where his studies had been broken off by war.

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10. Why He Was Called the English Hippocrates

Hippocrates, the Greek physician of the fifth century BC, stood in Sydenham’s time — as he still does — for medicine based on watching the patient and following the natural course of a disease, rather than on speculation. When Sydenham’s contemporaries called him “the rival of Hippocrates”, and later writers settled on “the English Hippocrates” (he is also called the “father of English medicine”), they were describing that same habit of mind.

Sydenham stated his method plainly. The physician’s business, in Latham’s translation of his later writings, is the “industrious investigation of the history of diseases and of the effect of remedies, as shown by the only true teacher — experience”. He described the epidemics of London year by year, told scarlet fever apart from measles, recorded whooping cough, and left the first clear account of the childhood chorea that bears his name.

The modern historical literature has kept the nickname alive. Pearce’s 1995 note is titled “Thomas Sydenham ‘The British Hippocrates’”; G. Low’s 1999 biographical essay is “Thomas Sydenham: The English Hippocrates”; Dewhurst in 1962 called him a “reformer of clinical medicine”; and H. Bloch in 1994 called him “the father of clinical observation”. Sloan’s review concludes that his meticulous records paved the way for the clinical approach to medicine.

The man behind the name

The life behind the reputation was a modest one: a soldier’s youth, a degree granted in a time of upheaval, a licence rather than a fellowship, and a London practice carried on for nearly thirty years while he himself suffered from gout and stone. His lasting influence came not from office or theory but from the books in which he wrote down, plainly and in detail, what he saw. The story of those observations continues on the Bedside Observation page, and the story of his two natural remedies on the laudanum and Jesuits’ bark pages.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Dewhurst K. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) reformer of clinical medicine. Med Hist. 1962;6(2):101-18. PubMed PMID: 16562238
  2. Sloan AW. Thomas Sydenham, 1624-1689. S Afr Med J. 1987;72(4):275-8. PubMed PMID: 3303370
  3. Pearce JM. Thomas Sydenham "The British Hippocrates". J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1995;58(3):292. PubMed PMID: 7897408
  4. Low G. Thomas Sydenham: The English Hippocrates. Aust N Z J Surg. 1999;69(4):258-62. PubMed PMID: 10327115
  5. Bloch H. Thomas Sydenham, MD (1624-1689): the father of clinical observation. J Fam Pract. 1994;38(1):80-1. PubMed PMID: 8289057
  6. King LS. Empiricism and rationalism in the works of Thomas Sydenham. Bull Hist Med. 1970;44(1):1-11. PubMed PMID: 4909172
  7. Meynell GG. John Locke and the preface to Thomas Sydenham's Observationes medicae. Med Hist. 2006;50(1):93-110. PubMed PMID: 16502873
  8. Dewhurst K. An Oxford medical quartet. Sydenham, Willis, Locke, and Lower. Br Med J. 1963;2(5361):857-60. PubMed PMID: 14063931
  9. Dewhurst K. Sydenham's original treatise on smallpox with a preface, and dedication to the Earl of Shaftesbury, by John Locke. Med Hist. 1959;3(4):278-302. PubMed PMID: 13816328
  10. Dorwart BB. Thomas sydenham (1624-1689), on gout: 1717. J Clin Rheumatol. 2004;10(4):227. PubMed PMID: 17043515
  11. Nuki G, Simkin PA. A concise history of gout and hyperuricemia and their treatment. Arthritis Res Ther. 2006;8 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S1. PubMed PMID: 16820040

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Thomas+Sydenham+history
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Sydenham+Locke
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=seventeenth+century+English+medicine+history
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=gout+history+urate

Further Reading

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