Hippocrates himself was as particular about his barley-ptisan as any
Florence Nightingale of our time could be.
The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession,
belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction
of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that
makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians?
His prescriptions consisted principally of simples. An aperient or an
opiate, a "cardiac" or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of a
somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. It was not by his
pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name. It was by
daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horseback
for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and the noxious and
often loathsome rubbish of the established schools. Of course Sydenham
was much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to
remind his reader. "I must needs conclude," he says, "either that I am
void of merit, or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are
formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to
gratitude, make a very small part of the whole." If in the fearless
pursuit of truth you should find the world as ungracious in the
nineteenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a
lesson of self-reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious
physician: "'T is none of my business to inquire what other persons
think, but to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no
favor of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper.
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