16 THE HUNTERIAN ORATION.
Our historical records do not indicate that the discovery of the Circulation was immediately succeeded
by striking improvements in the practical departments
of medicine and surgery. More of the groundwork
was yet wanting in the knowledge and comprehensive
views of the Animal Economy, from which the advances
of medicine in modern times have emanated. The
researches of Harvey in two great subjects of Physiology, the Circulation of the Blood, and Generation, had
no decided effect, it would appear on the sagacious
mind of Sydenham, who flourished in the immediately
succeeding period, for we do not find that in his writings, he enforced the study of anatomy and physiology,
nor does he specify this study when propounding the
ways of improving physic. Probably, however, it was
for the reason that Sydenham, strongly impressed with
the error of his time in interweaving philosophical speculations with the histories of disease, thought, that he
could render the best service to medicine by proceeding upon the model of the Father of Physic, the never
enough extolled Hippocrates, as he styles him, to collect and record accurate histories of disease, free from
preconceived opinions, inculcating that, ‘ although
there are varieties in the symptoms of disease, yet Nature acts in so orderly a manner that the same disease
appears with the like symptoms in different persons, so
that the symptoms observed in Socrates in his illness,
may be applied to another person afflicted with the
�
