Thomas Sydenham 1624-1689 L. 1663

Attributed to Mary Beale

In a painted carved stone oval; head and shoulders to right, head turned to look at the spectator; grey hair falling on shoulders; dark grey eyes, clean-shaven, double chin with slight cleft; plain white neck cloth with long ends; wrapped in a loose satin grey robe; greyish-brown background; lit from the left; on the right in small gold letters: Sydenham.

Presented in 1691 by the sitter's son, William Sydenham (d. 1718)

Exhibited National Portrait Exhibition, 1866. This portrait was on loan to the National Portrait Gallery between 1902 and 1960.

Thomas Sydenham was one of the greatest English physicians, and has been called "the Father of English Medicine".

Very little is accurately known about his personal life. He was born in Dorset, and went up to Magdalen Hall at Oxford in 1642, apparently without the intention of reading medicine. The Civil War broke out that year, and Sydenham left Oxford to fight on the Parliamentarian side. When he returned to Oxford in 1647, it was to study medicine. Apart from a second period of military service in 1651, in which he was severely wounded, Sydenham remained in Oxford for several years and was made a Fellow of All Souls. He resigned his fellowship about 1656 and moved to London to practise; in 1663 he was admitted to the College as a Licentiate. He practised in London for the rest of his life and died there in 1689.

Sydenham's achievement was to introduce an entirely new spirit into the medicine of his time. He was primarily a practical physician and he laid the greatest stress on clinical observation; his own powers of observation were outstanding. He has been called "the English Hippocrates" because of his emphasis on accurate description and on the clinical, rather than theoretical, aspects of disease. Sydenham showed a further resemblance to Hippocrates in his faith in the healing powers of nature; he looked on disease as the effort of nature to restore a patient to health by neutralising and eliminating injurious matter in the body. He considered fever to be one of nature's means of curing the diseased body. Apart from this general view of disease, Sydenham was not concerned with theories and scorned those physicians who were. This attitude led to some hostility between Sydenham and other physicians in the later years of his life.

Sydenham embodied his observations in detailed descriptions of a large number of diseases. In particular, he wrote classic descriptions of many fevers; his Methodus Curandi Febres, published in 1666, contains detailed accounts of influenza, measles and scarlet fever (he probably introduced the latter term). This work was enlarged by an essay on plague in 1668--plague was endemic in London during Sydenham's early years there and culminated in the great plague of 1665--and was further expanded in later editions, being re-titled Observationes Medicae in 1676. He held that the character of epidemics was partly determined by certain climatic conditions, and described and classified epidemics of pleurisy, pneumonia, rheumatism and the fevers between 1661 and 1675.

He was the first to recognize hysteria as a distinct disease and described for the first time the mild convulsions of children, which became known as Sydenham's chorea. In 1680, he published an account of venereal disease. Sydenham suffered from gout from 1649 until the end of his life, and this directed his attention to this disease. His great work on gout (Tractatus de Podagra et Hydrope), published in 1683, was partly based on his close observation of his own symptoms. He also suffered severely from renal calculus and haematuria.

Sydenham revolutionized the treatment of smallpox and of fevers in general, advocating a cooling régime with fresh air and a bland diet. Among the drugs whose use he popularized were cinchona (Jesuit's bark, a source of quinine), which he advocated for the treatment of fevers, despite opposition, and opium, which he was the first to use in fluid form (Sydenham's laudanum). When he considered that treatment could not significantly affect the disease process, Sydenham did nothing, a considerable innovation at the time.

Sydenham's fame as a physician increased steadily; during his lifetime he was particularly revered in Europe. He was highly respected by the Fellows of the College, although he himself remained a Licentiate, as he did not take his M.D. until thirteen years before his death and so did not qualify for Fellowship. He was a great and modest man, little concerned with academic honours. Although he showed little interest in the experimental work going on in anatomy, physiology and chemistry, he was a close friend of the chemist Robert Boyle, to whom he dedicated his first book. Among his many other eminent friends was the empirical philosopher, John Locke.