certainty of what I here publish, it would not become me to engage your lordship's name in a controversy which (if I had been as forward by noise and clamour to maintain, as others, by reproaches, false reports, secret and open defamation have been hot to prosecute and decry) had by this time grown into a faction." The dedication then proceeds to condemn the modes of treatment pursued by many medical men, and for which they were praised, even when they killed their patients. "I say not this to undervalue the medicines of other men, but only to let your lordship see how differently it has fared with me, who have undergone so many rebukes and reproaches in the prosecution of a plain and open method, which I never endeavoured, nor indeed could, conceal from any one who had but the curiosity to observe it, and which I think had no fault, unless it be one to be plain and easy and such as poor people may, to the saving of their lives, make use of without the help of a physician." "At least, my lord, I thought it reasonable to let you see that I had practised nothing in your family but what I durst own and publish to the world, and let my countrymen see that I tell them nothing here but what I have already tried with no ill success on several in the family of one of the greatest and most eminent personages amongst them."1 The long fragment of a preface which Locke wrote for Sydenham was intended to justify the production of this treatise on "the history and cure of a disease which, however but too well know by its terrible aspect and fatal effects to most families in England, yet, as to the true state of the disease and the right method of ordering it, has hitherto lain in obscurity." It offered many ex1 Shaftesbury Papers, series viii., no. 2. . 36-38 cuses for the ignorant and mischievous treatment of small-pox adopted by most other practitioners, and pointed out that Sydenham could easily have made a fortune by killing his patients in the orthodox way, but complained that for curing them by his own method he was everywhere abused and maligned.1 The treatise on small-pox for which Locke supplied these preludes, whether the notes for it were written out or not in 1670, was not issued then or afterwards, at any rate as a separate work. Sydenham published nothing after the second edition of the Methodus Curandi Febres' in 1668, till 1676, when he incorporated most of his notes and a great deal of fresh matter in the Observationes Medicae,' which was substantially a new work. This work was dedicated, not to Lord Ashley, but to Dr. Mapletoft, and Sydenham supplied a preface different from Locke's. Locke was then in France, and the manuscripts from which the foregoing extracts have been made were apparently packed away with his other papers at Exeter House, out of Sydenham's reach. Sydenham is especially famous for his substitution of cool treatment and generous diet for the stewing and starving system previously and in his day adopted by nearly all other practitioners in dealing with small-pox ; he is hardly less famous for his employment of Peruvian bark in the cure of agues, and of laudanum in the cure of dysentery, gout and other maladies. Immensely valuable as those innovations were, however, his greatest service to medical science consisted in his recognition of the great truth that the physician's duty is to aid, 1 Shaftesbury Papers, series viii., no. 2. 2 Some of the notes, or copies of them, were retained by Locke. See 'Anecdota Sydenhamiana,' p. 58, etc. not to thwart, the course of nature. "That practice, and that alone," he wrote, "will bring relief to the sufferer, which elicits the curative indications from the phenomena of the diseases themselves, and confirms them by experience. The improvement of physic in my opinion depends, first, upon collecting as genuine and natural a description or history of diseases as can be procured, and, secondly, upon laying down a fixed and complete method of cure. In writing a natural history of diseases, every merely philosophical hypothesis should x be set aside, and the manifest and natural phenomena, however minute, should be noted with the utmost exactness. The usefulness of this procedure cannot be easily overrated; for can there be a shorter way, or indeed any other way, of coming at the causes of disease, or of discovering the curative indications, than by a certain perception of the peculiar symptoms? By these steps and helps it was that the father of physic, the great Hippocrates, came to excel; his theory being no more than an exact description or view of nature. He found that nature alone often terminates diseases, and works a cure with a few simple medicines, and often enough with no medicines at all. If only one person in every age had accurately described and constantly cured but a single disease, and made known his secret, physic would not be where it now is. But we have long since forsaken the ancient method of cure, founded upon the knowledge of conjunct causes, insomuch that the art, as at this day practised, is the art rather of talking about diseases than of curing them. The discovering and assigning of remote causes is an impossible attempt; only immediate and conjunct causes fall within the compass of our knowledge."1 1 I have further condensed the above citation from a condensed . 36-38 Those were the main points in Sydenham's teaching and method for which he had, and felt himself honoured in having, the approval of John Locke. Long after the period that we are now considering Locke continued to look upon medicine as his proper vocation, and there seems to have been no abatement of the interest taken by him in medical studies and pursuits. But he also took great interest in other matters, and, partly by necessity, partly by choice, these other matters diverted his attention. Had he so chosen, he might, of course, have remained quietly at Oxford until, without asking any favours from the university authorities, he had qualified himself for a doctor's degree, and then he could have settled down, as his friend Sydenham had done, as a regular working physician in London or elsewhere. Fortunately for his own and later generations, however commendable such a course might have been, he did not pursue it. He allowed himself to drift into other occupations, and in each he did so much that posterity has almost forgotten that he was ever a medical man at all. Thus it occurs that at the very time when he was devoting all the leisure he could spare from Lord Ashley's service to medical studies, medical practice and medical authorship, he was also busily occupied with altogether different work, and work which in 1670 and afterwards absorbed so much of his attention that he was compelled almost to abandon the pursuit of medicine. This change translation by Dr. John Brown, in his paper on Locke and Sydenham,' in Horae Subsecivae' (1861), first series, pp. 1-104. This paper contains much interesting information about Sydenham, and some welcome remarks, amid many biographical inaccuracies, about Locke. was evidently brought about in the first instance by the terms, whatever they were, upon which he entered Lord Ashley's service in 1667; but there can be no doubt that the new duties assigned to him were undertaken and carried on as a labour of love. More than eighty years before, Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother adventurers had made the first bold English attempt to rival the Spaniards in their planting of colonies in America; and, though Raleigh's Virginia failed dismally, his example encouraged others to enter on the work with better result. The puritan colonies had been founded further north in the American continent, a smaller Virginia had begun to grow in the upper portion of the territory assigned to Raleigh by Queen Elizabeth, and some prosperous settlements had been made in the West Indies, though these were still rather the haunts of pirates than the homes of planters, before any serious plans were laid for occupying the district that had especially tempted Raleigh by its rich fertility and luxuriant beauty. In 1663, however, all earlier patents being revoked, this district, now known as Carolina, was given by Charles the Second to eight "lords proprietors," Lord Chancellor Clarendon, the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Craven, Lord Berkeley, Lord Ashley, Sir George Carteret, Sir William Berkeley, and Sir John Colleton.1 Of these patentees Ashley was the most active and influential; and thus it happened that Locke, being Ashley's principal adviser and assistant, became in some sort of irregular way the chief secretary or manager of the whole company of lords proprietors of Carolina. His conduct in this new position shows something more than the versatility of his talents and the superabundance of his energy. 1 Shaftesbury Papers, series ix., no. 1*. |