Thomas Sydenham (jan 1, 1624 – jan 1, 1689)

Description:

Thomas Sydenham was born in 1624 into a landed family in England. He is called “the English Hippocrates”. He believed that medical knowledge should come from medical practice, and that physicians should study through their own eyes and not through books. Empiricism characterized his approach to clinical medicine, diseases and treatment. In comparison to Vesalius and Harvey (who were looking at corpses and animal dissection), Sydenham was looking at patients. He was against any idea that you can base medicine on the basic sciences, and anatomical study was meaningless.

Sydenham introduced the ontological conception of disease. He kept case histories of his patients including symptoms, treatments and results (similar pattern to Hippocrates). He also tried to limit accounts to what he observed himself, limiting any speculation. However, Sydenham used these case histories to build disease histories and to develop theories and patterns. For him, diseases existed as discrete real entities (ontological conception of disease). A collective of symptoms presents itself but there is a unity behind the symptoms, transforming individual sickness into disease entities.

Observationes Medicae (1676)

Added to timeline:

Date: