DR. ANDREW BROWN AND SYDENHAM. "Physick of its own nature has no more uncertainty or conjecturalness than these other noble professions of War, Law, Politicks, Navigation, in all which the event can be no more predicted or ascertained than in Physick, and all that the Artist is accomptable for is the rational and prudent conduct that nothing be overdone or undone."— Epilogue to the Five Papers lately passed betwixt the two Physicians, Dr. O. and Dr. E., containing some remarks pleasant and profitable, concerning the usefulness of VOMITING and PURGING in FEVERS, by ANDREW Brown, M.D. DR. ANDREW BROWN AND SYDENHAM. HUNDRED and ninety years ago, Dr. Andrew Brown, the laird of Dolphinton, was a well-known and indeed famous man in Edinburgh, and not unknown in London and the general medical world. Who now has ever heard of him? Sic transit. To us in Edinburgh he is chiefly memorable as having been the ancestor of Dr. Richard Mackenzie, who perished so nobly and lamentably in the Crimea; and whose is one of the many graves which draw our hearts to that bleak field of glory and havoc. We who were his fellows, are not likely to see again embodied so much manly beauty, so much devotion to duty, so much zeal, honour, and affection. But to the profession in Scotland, his great great grandfather ought to be better known than he is, for he was the first to introduce here the doctrines of Sydenham, and to recommend the use of anti monial emetics in the first stage of fever. This he did in a little book, called "A Vindicatory Schedule concerning the new cure of Fevers, containing a disquisition, theoretical and practical, of the new and most effectual method of cureing continual fevers, first invented and delivered by the sagacious Dr. Thomas Sydenham.”—Edin. 1691. This book, and its author's energetic advocacy of its principles by his other writings and by his practice, gave rise to a fierce controversy; and in the library of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, there is a stout shabby little volume of pamphlets, on both sides—" Replies," and "Short Answers,” and "Refutations," and "Surveys," and "Looking - Glasses," Defences," "Letters," "Epilogues," etc., lively and furious once, but now resting together as quietly as their authors are in the Old Greyfriars church-yard, having long ceased from troubling. There is much curious, rude, vigorous, hard-headed, bad-Englished stuff in them, with their wretched paper and print, and general ugliness; much also to make us thankful that we are in our own now, not their then. Such tearing away with strenuous logic and good learning, at mere clouds and shadows, with occasional lucid intervals of sense, observation, and wit, tending too frequently to wut. Brown was a Whig, and a friend of Andrew Fletcher and King William; and in his little book on "The Character of the True Publick Spirit," besides much honest good sense and advanced politics, there is a clever and edifying parallel drawn between the diseases of the body politic, and those of the body natural, and also an amusing classification of doctors; but for all this, and much more excellent matter, I have no space here. Dr. Brown thus describes his going up to London to visit Sydenham, and see his practice. "But in the year 1687, perusing the first edition of his Schedula Monitoria, where he delivers, as confirmed by manifold experience, not only a new, but a quite contrarie method to the common, of curing Continual Fevers: I did long hesitate, thinking that either he, or all other Physicians were grossly deceived about the cure of Fevers; if not, as their patients used to be, they were in an high delirium; and lest the preconceived opinion that I had of the man's ingenuity should so far impose upon my credulity, as to draw me into an error likeways with him, and make me to experiment that method, when I knew not but I might run the hazard to sacrifice some to my temerity, nothing could settle my tossed thoughts below the sight and knowledge of the thing itself. 1 Note, page 447. |