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John Locke and the Preface to Thomas Sydenham's Observationes Medicae

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

G G Meynell
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Information
Medical History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , 01 January 2006 , pp. 93 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2006. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 The literature on Sydenham is considerable: a bibliography up to 1990 is in G G Meynell, A bibliography of Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), Folkestone, Winterdown Books, 1990, pp. 142–61. For general accounts, see J F Payne, Thomas Sydenham, London, T F Unwin, 1900; idem, Dictionary of National Biography, 1889, vol. 19, pp. 246–53; Kenneth Dewhurst, Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689): his life and original writings, London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966; Idem, John Locke (1632–1704), physician and philosopher, London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963; H J Cook, ‘Thomas Sydenham’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol. 53, pp. 535–42 (hereafter Oxford DNB). For general questions, see, for example, Gunnar Aspelin, ‘Locke and Sydenham’, Theoria (Göteborg), 1949, 15: 29–37; L S King, ‘Empiricism and rationalism in the works of Thomas Sydenham’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1970, 44: 1–11; François Duchesneau, L'empirisme de Locke, The Hague, M Nijhoff, 1973; Patrick Romanell, John Locke and medicine, Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1984.

2 Thomas Sydenham, Observationes medicae circa morborum acutorum historiam et curationem, London, G Kettilby, 1676. For detail, see Meynell, A bibliography, op. cit., note 1 above, ch.1.

3 G G Meynell, Materials for a biography of Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689): a new survey of public and private archives, Folkestone, Winterdown Books, 1988, pp. 45–55, esp. §11. ‘Sydenham on the principles of medicine’, pp. 43–5.

4 Guy Meynell, ‘Locke's collaboration with Sydenham: the significance of Locke's indexes’, Locke Newsletter, 1996, 27: 65–74.

5 G G Meynell, Authorship and vocabulary in Thomas Sydenham's Methodus and Observationes. With an appendix on isolating key words and phrases, Dover, Winterdown Books, 1995; idem, Materials, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 41–2, 82–5.

6 Meynell, Materials, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 32, 33, 43–4.

7 When he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 1 July 1642, he was listed as “Arm”; i.e. armiger, one entitled to a coat-of-arms (Ibid., p. 10).

8 Montague Burrows (ed.), The register of the visitors of the University of Oxford from AD 1647 to AD 1658, Camden Society, New Series 29, London, for the Camden Society, 1881, p. 36; Meynell, Materials, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 17.

9 II.2.29 (signifying: section II, chapter 2, paragraph 29).

10 Sydenham, Observationes, dedication; Meynell, Materials, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 68, 75.

11 G G Meynell, ‘A database for John Locke's medical notebooks and medical reading’, Med. Hist., 1997, 42: 473–86 (the raw data now form Part II of the writer's web site, http://www.haven.u-net.com). For details of Locke's ill health and career at Oxford, see notes 1–3.

12 Kenneth Dewhurst (ed.), Thomas Willis's Oxford lectures, Oxford, Sandford Publications, 1980; Guy Meynell, ‘Locke as a pupil of Peter Stahl’, Locke Studies, 2001, 1: 221–7.

13 See Ayliffe Ivye to John Locke, 20 May 1660, Letter 97 in The correspondence of John Locke, ed. E S de Beer, 8 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 146–7.

14 Kenneth Dewhurst, ‘Locke's contributions to Boyle's researches on the air and on human blood’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1962, 17: 198–206.

15 Thomas Sydenham, Methodus curandi febres, propriis observationibus superstructa, London, J Crook, 1666. For the Latin text with an English translation in parallel, see G G Meynell (ed.), Folkestone, Winterdown Books, 1987.

16 Guy Meynell, ‘Sydenham, Locke and Sydenham's De peste sive febre pestilentiali’, Med. Hist., 1993, 37: 330–2. See Sydenham, Observationes, II.2.26–28.

17 G G Meynell (ed.), Thomas Sydenham's ‘Observationes medicae’ (London, 1676) and his ‘Medical observations’ (Manuscript 572 of the Royal College of Physicians of London), with new transcripts of related Locke MSS. in the Bodleian Library, Folkestone, Winterdown Books, 1991.

18 “Physician and divine”; Gresham professor of physic, 1675–79, Oxford DNB, vol. 36, pp. 584–5.

19 Sydenham believed that an epidemic was caused by effluvia from the bowels of the earth which differed from year to year so that each epidemic was marked by a different accompanying condition like enteritis or pleurisy (I.1.6, I.2.1). See Major Greenwood, ‘Sydenham as an epidemiologist’, Proc. R. Soc. Med., 1918–19, 12: 55–76. I Galdston, ‘The epidemic constitution in historic perspective’, Bull. N. Y. Acad. Med., 1942, 18: 606–19.

20 Summarized in Table 4 in Meynell (ed.), Thomas Sydenham's ‘Observationes medicae’, op. cit., note 17 above.

21 Earlier drafts, some heavily corrected, are in Bodleian MS Locke c.29 (Philip Long, A summary catalogue of the Lovelace collection of the papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University Press, 1959, pp. 37–8). An example is shown in Fig. 7 in Dewhurst, Dr Thomas Sydenham, op. cit., note 1 above.

22 They can be followed in Meynell's edition (op. cit., note 15 above) where the paragraphs are numbered by the same system.

23 Guy Meynell, ‘Locke as author of Anatomia and De arte medica’, Locke Newsletter, 1994, 25: 65–73.

24 Ibid.

25 At the suggestion of a referee, the translation by R G Latham (1848) for the Sydenham Society is given here as an appendix. The Latin original appears as Part IV of http://www.haven.u-net.com.

26 Apart from Latham, the texts used here include Dewhurst, Dr Thomas Sydenham, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 79–84, 85–93; P H Nidditch and G A J Rogers (eds), Drafts for the Essay concerning human understanding, and other philosophical writings. Volume I, Drafts A and B, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, ed. P H Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975.

27Quemadmodum a natura ita comparata est humani corporis Fabrica, ut nec prae jugi particularum fluxu sibi semper constet, …

28 Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Locke, Cambridge University Press, 1994; R H Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966; Antonio Clericuzio, ‘A redefinition of Boyle's chemistry and corpuscular philosophy’, Ann. Sci., 1990, 47: 561–89.

29 See, for example, Kenneth D Keele, ‘The Sydenham–Boyle theory of morbific particles’, Med. Hist., 1974, 18: 240–8.

30 Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1928, pp. 291, 331, etc.; René Descartes, Traité de la lumiere, ch. 3.

31 An isolated quotation distorts Locke's views (see, for example, Essay II.xxvii.3: “In the state of living Creatures, their Identity depends not on a mass of the same Particles; but on something else”). M B Bolton, ‘Locke on identity: the scheme of simple and compounded things’, in Kenneth F Barber and Jorge J E Gracia (eds), Individuation and identity in early modern philosophy, Albany, State University of New York, 1994, pp. 103–31.

32 Barbara B Kaplan, “Divulging of useful truths in physik”: the medical agenda of Robert Boyle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, at pp. 106–14; M A Stewart, Selected philosophical papers of Robert Boyle, Manchester University Press, 1979, pp. 22, 193 and 241; John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The library of John Locke, Oxford University Press, 1965, see entries 413–72.

33 Signifying p. 86, line 17, in Dewhurst, Dr Thomas Sydenham, op. cit., note 1 above.

34 For a general discussion of Locke's views, see Maurice Mandelbaum, Philosophy, science, and sense perception, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1964, ch. 1, or Paul Guyer, Locke's philosophy of language, in Chappell (ed.), op. cit., note 28 above, 1994, pp. 115–45.

35 Sydenham, Methodus, op. cit., note 15 above, p. 108, reused as I.5.27 in Observationes medicae (1676).

36 J W Gough, ‘John Locke's herbarium’, Bodleian Library Record, 1962–67, 7: 42–6.

37 D G Bates, ‘Sydenham and the medical meaning of “method”’, Bull. Hist. Med, 1977, 51: 324–38; Jeffrey Boss, ‘The methodus medendi as an index of change in the philosophy of medical science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Hist. Philos. Life Sci., 1979, 1: 13–42.

38 See the authors cited in note 9 of Meynell, ‘Locke as author’, op. cit., note 23 above.

39 Kargon, op. cit., note 28 above; F K Taylor, ‘Sydenham's disease entities’, Psychol. Med., 1982, 22: 243–50.

40 … dicti Humores in formam substantialem, seu Speciem exaltantur …

41 Robert Boyle, The sceptical chymist, London, 1661, p. 379. See Guy Meynell, ‘Locke's corpuscularianism and Boyle's corpuscular philosophy’, Locke Studies, 2003, 3: 133–45.

42 From The epistle to the reader.

43 Francis Bacon, Descriptio globi intellectualis (1653), ch. 3.

44 “Physiological” does not follow the sense of the opening of [9.]. Possibly a typesetting error with “Physiol …” substituted for “Philosoph …”.

45 Hippocrates, Epidemics VI, 5.1.

46 Hippocrates, Nutriment, 15, 39.

47 Hippocrates, Diseases III, 14.

48 Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 6, 38.