Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen:  one of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an “Essay on the Human Understanding,” three years younger than his teacher; the other, Thomas Sydenham, five years older.  Both returned to England.  Locke, whose medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good fortune to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of Shaftesbury was suffering, which led to an operation that saved his life.  Less felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla culinaria virgo,—­which I am afraid would in those days have been translated kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary department,—­who turned him off after she had got tired of him, and called in another practitioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124.  By John Brown, M. D. Edinburgh, 1866.] This helped, perhaps, to spoil a promising doctor, and make an immortal metaphysician.  At any rate, Locke laid down the professional wig and cane, and took to other studies.

The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy.  As Barbeyrac was found in opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational side against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with Parliament against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the College of Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in their hall by the side of that of Harvey.

What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this he studied the course of diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular season; to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks, instead of smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out their disease; he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he, like his teacher, used few and comparatively simple remedies; he did not give any drug at all, if he thought none was needed, but let well enough alone.  He was a sensible man, in short, who applied his common sense to diseases which he had studied with the best light of science that he could obtain.

The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or less felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the eighteenth century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and then in Latin.  I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to reform in the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as there was in that of the learned big-wigs of the “College,” who valued their remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the extravagant and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.

During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the medical profession gave great names to our history.  But John Brooks belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited—­subject.  There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston, in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his corporeal republic.