granted him by the College of Physicians. His first medical treatise, which bore the title "Methodus Curandi Febres" [Method of Treating Fevers], was published in 1666. The third edition of this work was issued ten years later, but with the title changed to "Observationes Medicae etc." Between 1666 and 1683 he published several other treatises, the more important of which deal with epidemic diseases—syphilis, small-pox, hysteria and gout.
During the later period of Sydenham's career he attained great celebrity as a physician; but this celebrity would have been short-lived if it had rested on nothing more substantial than mere cleverness and professional success. As a matter of fact he had brought about, by his teaching and also by his example, a most important revolution in medicine, and it was the appreciation of this fact which led the physicians of England to bestow upon him, after his death, the appellation of "The English Hippocrates," and which ultimately gave him so highly honorable a position in the history of medicine in general. A brief review of the state of medicine in England during the seventeenth century will enable the reader to understand the full importance of the change which Sydenham was instrumental in bringing about.
The physicians of that period were split up into three sects: the followers of Galen, with whom should be classed the Graeco-Arabists; the iatrochemists; and the iatrophysicists.
The Galenists were largely intent upon the strictest interpretation of the teachings of Hippocrates, Galen and some of the Arabian authors. Instead of studying disease itself they devoted their time and thoughts largely to the interpretation of the words used by these fathers in medicine—i.e., to philology. Real progress in the science of medicine was not possible along this route. Accepting without dispute the dogma of the four humoral qualities, together with the different temperaments which result from the predominance of any one of them, they combated these different temperaments or constitutions by pre-
