Thomas Sydenham (sep 10, 1624 – dec 29, 1689)

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Thomas Sydenham was an English physician of the late Renaissance. Although early in his life he focused primarily on politics as a devout protestant, after the monarchy returned, he switched his focus to medicine. Ideologically, inspired by Hippocrates and more modernly by Locke and Bacon, Sydenham was an empiricist and despised rationalism and thus considered clinical observation as the only useful aspect of medicine. Sydenham was given the nickname of English Hippocrates. As a result, he was a strong critic of the main contemporary medical movements at the time of iatrophysics and iatrochemistry. Perhaps even more crucially, he considered anatomy as a science that is useless to medicine as it is a convoluted endeavor that can only be connected back to practice through rationalism. Instead, he focused on detailed observation. Based on his philosophy, Sydenham published his famous textbook Observationes Medicae (published 1676) where he emphasized the importance of direct observation of the patient and the characterization of the disease. Interestingly, the origin of a specific disease was not important to Sydenham, despite his strong emphasis on treating the disease itself.
However, Sydenham’s greatest contribution to medicine was his categorization of diseases themselves. Due to his detailed characterizations of diseases in patients, he formed the history of individual diseases and created an ontology of diseases. Diseases were categorized and could be identified by a collection of symptoms and could be treated with treatments that were shown to work repeatedly in practice. This type of categorization of disease still stands today and has had long term effects on medicine such as reductionism and dehumanization. Patients are often no longer seen in their specific condition, but rather simply belonging to a specific disease classification and are treated as such.

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