Thomas Sydenham was born into a prominent family in Dorset, England. He received a bachelor of medicine degree from Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1648, and a doctor of medicine degree from Cambridge in 1676. In 1655 he began practicing medicine in King Street, Westminster. Because he reintroduced into medicine the Hippocratic method of accurate bedside observation and the use of these observations in the classification and treatment of disease, he became known as the "English Hippocrates."

At the time of Sydenham's entry into medicine, the climate of his profession tended toward the theoretical. Many of his colleagues were systematists who believed that all physical phenomena could be explained by a single chemical cause. In contrast, Sydenham directed his attention toward his patients' particular symptoms. He saw a need to develop a general clinical description of individual diseases, and his eventual fame arose from the firsthand accounts he recorded at his patients'...