thoroughly practical, clear-headed physicians.  A model of this sort arose in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), who took men back to Hippocrates, just as Harvey had led them back to Galen.  Sydenham broke with authority and went to nature.  It is extraordinary how he could have been so emancipated from dogmas and theories of all sorts.  He laid down the fundamental proposition, and acted upon it, that “all disease could be described as natural history.”  To do him justice we must remember, as Dr. John Brown says, “in the midst of what a mass of errors and prejudices, of theories actively mischievous, he was placed, at a time when the mania of hypothesis was at its height, and when the practical part of his art was overrun and stultified by vile and silly nostrums” ("Horae Subsecivae,” Vol.  I, 4th ed., Edinburgh, 1882, p. 40).

Listen to what he says upon the method of the study of medicine:  “In writing therefore, such a natural history of diseases, every merely philosophical hypothesis should 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, as compared with the subtle inquiries and trifling notions of modern writers, for can there be a shorter, or indeed any other way of coming at the morbific causes, or 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.”

Towards the end of the century many great clinical teachers arose, of whom perhaps the most famous was Boerhaave, often spoken of as the Dutch Hippocrates, who inspired a group of distinguished students.  I have already referred to the fact that Franciscus Sylvius at Leyden was the first among the moderns to organize systematic clinical teaching.  Under Boerhaave, this was so developed that to this Dutch university students flocked from all parts of Europe.  After teaching botany and chemistry, Boerhaave succeeded to the chair of physic in 1714.  With an unusually wide general training, a profound knowledge of the chemistry of the day and an accurate acquaintance with all aspects of the history of the profession, he had a strongly objective attitude of mind towards disease, following closely the methods of Hippocrates and Sydenham.  He adopted no special system, but studied disease as one of the phenomena of nature.  His clinical lectures, held bi-weekly, became exceedingly popular and were made attractive not less by the accuracy and care with which the cases were studied than by the freedom from fanciful doctrines and the frank honesty of the man.  He was much greater than his published work would indicate, and, as is the case with many teachers of the first rank, his greatest contributions were his pupils.  No other teacher of modern times has had such a following.  Among his favorite pupils may be mentioned Haller, the physiologist, and van Swieten and de Haen, the founders of the Vienna school.