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Editorial Matters

Formatting:

Use Word and avoid all special formatting. Employ standard margins and 12-point TNR font. Use Chicago/Turabian for treating titles of books, essays, plays, etc. Email your article as an attachment. Articles with 1,500 words or more should use short, meaningful subheadings to break up the text.

Articles will be provided with “See also…” tags, but do incorporate the subjects and titles of other articles into yours whenever appropriate. These will be bolded in the text and enable students to use the volumes more fully.

When introducing a personal name for the first time, use his or her full name and identify the person with a useful label, unless the context makes her or his position clear: Pope Urban II; England’s King Henry II; cleric and poet John Donne; biologist Graham Twigg; German-born missionary Albert-Schweitzer.

These should be used sparingly if at all, and the source of the quotation should be made very clear. Ideally one of your recommended readings will contain the quotation. Follow the quote in the text with parenthetical author, page (Powell, 235). If the work is not in your readings list, provide the source at the foot of your article and we may include it in the encyclopedia’s bibliography. If the quote is from the subject of the article, embed the source in the text: “In his biography, My Life and Times, Smith describes his discovery as “the most significant moment of my life.””

Articles of 500 or 1,000 words should have three citations, articles of 1,500 or 2,000 words should have five or six citations and, those with 2,500 or more should have eight to ten. Recent or classic books in English that are accessible to students (in all senses of the word) are to be preferred. Articles or book chapters may be included in a limited fashion, but with the caveats above. Works by the subject or other primary sources should be limited (one of three; two of ten) and reference works should be excluded. Citations should follow Chicago/Turabian style for bibliography reference.

Books: Last Name, First Name. Ttitle. City (,State Abbrev): Publisher, date.
Journal Article: Last Name, First Name. "Title." Journal Title (full) vol. (year) page ##.
Book Article: Last Name, First Name. "Article Title." In Book Title, ed. by Full Name (City: Publisher, date) pp. ##.

Sydenham, Thomas (1624-1689)  (511/500)

Known as the English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham was the greatest medical practitioner of his day. A close friend of the physician and empirical philosopher John Locke, Sydenham rejected traditional medical practice in favor of first-hand observation and description of suffering patients. Although an avid classifier of diseases, in the spirit of the Scientific Revolution, he avoided discussion of ultimate causes of disease and accepted humoral theory.

The son of a country gentleman, Thomas studied medicine sporadically at Oxford, between hitches with the Parliamentarian cavalry during the English Civil War. He was rewarded with a fellowship at All Souls College, which he abandoned in 1655 when he married. Settling in London, he conducted a medical practice among the poor, during which he carefully compiled his observations of symptoms and the courses of illnesses. He fled London during the Great Plague of 1665, but published his Method of Curing Fevers the following year. A second edition, including a section on plague, appeared in 1668, and a greatly expanded version, titled Medical Observations, in 1676. This earned him a medical doctorate from Cambridge University, though he was never a full member of the College of Physicians or Royal Society, both of which privileged theory over practice and traditional credentials.

Sydenham had little use for either, stressing in his works the importance of abandoning incorrect descriptive models for more accurate ones built up from actual experience. Just as scientists were developing classification systems for rocks and plants, he sought to differentiate diseases as carefully as possible. This would, he believed, lead to far more effective treatments. He distinguished continual fevers such as typhus and typhoid from intermittent fevers like malaria, and the diseases whose symptoms included high fevers, plague and smallpox. He further distinguished smallpox into two types: the milder “distinct pox” and the very dangerous “flux pox.” In shorter published letters he described and made recommendations for treating measles, syphilis, smallpox, and rheumatic fever. He also updated his Observations to include epidemics in London from 1675 to 1680.

Despite, or perhaps because of his rudimentary theoretical education in medicine, Sydenham rejected current practices such as astrological charting and dependence upon examination of urine and other human waste material, in favor of close attention to the sick human body itself. His descriptions of the symptomatic courses of diseases are thus highly detailed and unambiguous, and provide his readers with clear guidelines for diagnosis. His disinterest in theory, however, left him with the Galenic model of the human humors, and most of his prescriptions – usually bleeding and inducing vomiting and defecation – directly reflect the limitations of that model. He also ignored the recent advances in human physiology, often made by men he knew. See also Plague in Britain, 1500-1665.

Further Reading

Dewhurst, Kenneth. Dr. Thomas Sydenham: His Life and Original Writings. Berkeley: University of California, 1966.

Meynell. G.G. “Sydenham, Locke, and Sydenham's De peste sive febre pestilentiali.” Medical History 37 (1993) 330-32.