From the preface to his treatise on gout and dropsy, published in 1683, we find that Sydenham was compelled to lay aside his project of a complete book on chronic diseases by the extreme attacks of gout which his labours brought on. “Whenever I returned to my studies,” he says, “my gout returned to me.” A few years before, in 1677, he had been prevented from practising by a severe attack of gout, and he was compelled to spend another three months in the country to restore his health. He continued his labours, however, it is to be believed, beyond his strength, and several editions of his works, with fresh observations, were issued in the later years of his life. He died at his house in Pall Mall on the 29th of December, 1689, aged sixty-five, being buried at St. James’s, Westminster. The truly appropriate description, “Medicus in omne ævum nobilis,” was given of him by the College of Physicians in 1810, when a mural tablet was raised to his memory near his place of burial. Sydenham’s will shows that he had three sons—William, Henry, and James—the eldest of whom received entailed estates in Hertfordshire and Leicestershire. He bequeathed £30 for the professional education of his nephew James, afterwards Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law. Sydenham’s executor was Mr. Malthus, an apothecary of Pall Mall (great-grandfather of Professor Malthus), whom he enjoins to bury him with a careful abstinence from all ostentatious funeral pomp. It is perhaps not necessary to regret so acutely the lack of biographical details regarding Dr. Sydenham, as many have done, for we think that his character stands out clearly in his writings. In his letter to Dr. Mapletoft, already referred to, he says:— “After a few years spent in the arena of the university, I returned to London for the practice of medicine. The more I observed the facts of this science with an attentive eye, and the more I studied them with due and proper diligence, the more I became confirmed in the opinion which I have held up to the present hour, viz., _that the art of medicine was to be properly learnt only from its practice and its exercise_; and that, in all probability, he would be the best skilled in the detection of the true and genuine indications of treatment who had the most diligently and the most accurately attended to the natural phenomena of disease.”