except within seven miles of London, without being obliged to take any license from the Bishop. . . .
By other Acts another weighty affair is committed to the care of the College, [viz.,] the visiting of shops and the inspection of medicines; a thing surely of as much consequence at least to the patient as to the prescriber. . . .
Linacre was the first president of his new-erected college, and held that office for the seven years he lived after. . . . And perhaps no Founder ever had the good fortune to have his designs succeed more to his wish; this society has constantly produced one sett of men after another, who have done both credit and service to their country by their practice and their writings.
If further evidence be needed to show what was the type
of mind possessed by this remarkable English physician,
I may be permitted to quote here a single brief statement
made by his friend Erasmus, the famous Dutch scholar
and theologian, in a letter addressed to John Fisher,
Chancellor of Cambridge University: "Linacre is as deep
and acute a thinker as I have ever met with."
In England, during the seventeenth century, there appeared on the scene only one practicing physician of such conspicuous ability and of so marked personal traits of character as to place his name, after the lapse of a few years from the time of his death, and by the almost unanimous assent of his associates, high up on the roll of honor. I refer to the famous physician Sydenham.
Thomas Sydenham was born at Wynford Eagle, Dorsetshire, England, in 1624. At the age of eighteen he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, and remained there until 1644, when he enlisted in the Parliamentary Army. After a brief military service, he resumed his studies at the university and received his Bachelor's degree in 1648. It was only at a much later date (1676), however, that he was given (after he had pursued the prescribed course of studies) the degree of Doctor of Medicine,—and then not by Oxford, but by Cambridge. After leaving the university he first spent a few months at the Medical School of Montpellier, France, and then settled (1666) in London as a practicing physician, the necessary license having been
