74 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 



diac " or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst 

 of a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. 

 It was not by his pharmaceutic prescriptions that he 

 gained his great name. It was by daring to order 

 fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horse- 

 hack for consumptives, in place of the smothering sys- 

 tem, and the noxious and often loathsome rubbish of 

 the established schools. Of course Sydenham was 

 much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently 

 takes occasion to remind his reader. " I must needs 

 conclude," he says, " either that I am void of merit, 

 or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who 

 are formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to 

 be no strangers to gratitude, make a very small part 

 of the whole." * If in the fearless pursuit of truth 

 you should find the world as ungracious in the nine- 

 teenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you 

 may learn a lesson of self-reliance from another utter- 

 ance of the same illustrious physician : " 'T is none 

 of my business to inquire what other persons think, but 

 to establish my own observations ; in order to which, I 

 ask no favor of the reader but to peruse my writings 

 with temper." f 



The physician has learned a great deal from the 

 surgeon, who is naturally in advance of him, because 

 he has a better opportunity of seeing the effects of 



* Of the Small-Pox and Hysteric Diseases. Epistle to Dr. William 

 Cole, § 140, Swan's Translation, 

 t Works, Preface^ p. xxi. 



