The next{174} fifteen years of his life we know practically nothing of, save that he spent some time in Montpellier pursuing his medical studies. In 1663 he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians, but did not take his degree of Doctor until 1676,--thirteen years before his death. His chief work--_Medical Observations_--is said to have been originally written in English, and translated into Latin; it first appeared in 1666,--the year when fire and plague devastated London. He died of gout in 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. During the earliest years of the plague in London he fled, as was the general custom of that day. His model was Hippocrates. In pathology he was a humoralist without being a theorist. He knew only one standard,--observation and experience. Sharing the opinions of his day, he laid but little weight upon anatomy and physiology; yet he recognized their value when employed in the production of hypotheses. He conceived of disease as active, operative,--a natural effort of the body to remove morbid material from the blood; if this effort is violent and speedy, we have to do, he says, with an acute disease, but if slow and difficult, the condition is chronic. Fever was supposed to result mostly from cold or from epidemic influences. As causes of disease, he considered unknown influences and changes of the atmosphere very important. In his special pathology "inflammation of the blood" played the chief rôle, and upon it were made to depend nearly all acute and some chronic diseases. He arrived at what he called the "healing power of Nature," for which he made great claims in his description and observation of epidemics: but he believed there always remained a good deal for the physician to do, and in treating syphilis he even gave mercury until two kilogrammes of saliva were discharged daily. As compared with the therapeutics of that day his were manifestly simple,--and yet he employed, for example,{175} eighteen different herbs in one prescription, and that merely an ointment. The unreliability of the action of drugs induced him to rely upon specifics, as did Paracelsus, but he acknowledged only one such,--the then new discovery, cinchona,--not even allowing mercury such a position in the treatment of syphilis. Such drugs as he chose were mainly from the vegetable kingdom. The great importance of Sydenham, and all his statements, so far as we are concerned, centres about his struggle for the elucidation of the healing power of Nature, and for simple observation and simpler treatment, as opposed to the overgrown luxuriance of previous systems and theories. He became the standard-bearer of his age in his return to Hippocrates's method and art of healing, which are founded on the nature of things and on the limits of human ability.