Sydenham conceived the idea, too, of paying some attention to the wishes and tastes of the patient. “A person in a burning fever desires to drink freely of some small liquor; but the rules of art, built upon some hypothesis, having a different design in view, thwart the desire, and instead thereof order a cordial. In the meantime the patient, not being suffered to drink what he wishes, nauseates all kinds of food, but art commands him to eat. Another, after a long illness, begs hard, it may be, for something odd or questionable; here, again, impertinent art thwarts him and threatens him with death. How much more excellent the aphorism of Hippocrates: ‘Such food as is most grateful, though not so wholesome, is to be preferred to that which is better, but distasteful.’” He has nothing of the meddlesome practitioner about him. “Indeed, if I may speak my mind freely, I have been long of opinion that I act the part of an honest man and a good physician as often as I refrain entirely from medicines, when, upon visiting the patient, I find him no worse to-day than he was yesterday; whereas, if I attempt to cure the patient by a method of which I am uncertain, he will be endangered both by the experiment I am going to make on him and by the disease itself; nor will he so easily escape two dangers as one.” A fine description of one aspect of hysteria and hypochondria may here be given as an example of his power in the delineation of disease: “The patients believe that they have to suffer all the evils that can befall humanity, all the troubles that the world can supply. They have melancholy forebodings, they brood over trifles, cherishing them in their anxious and unquiet bosoms. Fear, anger, jealousy, suspicion, and the worst passions of the mind arise without cause. Joy, hope, cheerfulness, if they find place at all in their spirits, find it at intervals ‘few and far between,’ and then take leave quickly. In these, as in the painful feelings, there is no moderation. All is caprice. They love without measure those whom they will soon hate without reason. Now they will do this, now that—ever receding from their purpose.... All that they see in their dreams are funerals and the shadows of departed friends.”