ABSTRACT
Thomas Sydenham has posthumously acquired one of the greatest of all names in the history of western medicine. He is celebrated amongst historians of medicine as the inaugurator or reviver of clinical or bedside medicine – which we treat as a highly positive achievement – and has been awarded the title of the ‘English Hippocrates’. Sydenham’s political position and commitment is partly visible in the preface he wrote to the first edition of the book. This is how it begins: Whoever takes up medicine ought to weigh these matters seriously. The millenarianism embraced by the puritans was of quite recent vintage. To be a millenarian at all one has to believe in and welcome the inevitability of the thousand-year reign of Christ with his Saints. But whether one believes this lies in the distant future, or in the immediate future, or is already taking place, depends on circumstances.
