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FOREIGN LITERATURE,
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND
AND ART.

FEBRUARY, 1850.

From the North British Review.

LOCKE AND SYDENHAM.

THE studies of Metaphysics and Medicine have more in common, both as to means and ends, than may perhaps at first sight appear. John Locke and Thomas Sydenham,-the one the founder of our analytical philosophy of mind, and the other of our practical medicine, were not only great personal friends, but were of essential use to each other in their respective departments; and we may safely affirm, that for much in the Essay on Human Understanding, we are indebted to its author's intimacy with Sydenham, "one of the master builders at this time in the commonwealth of learning," as Locke calls him, in company with "Boyle, Huygens, and the incomparable Mr. Newton:" And Sydenham, it is well known, in the third edition of his "Observationes Medica," expresses his deep obligation to Locke in his dedicatory letter to their common friend Dr. Mapletoft, in these words:- "Nosti præterea, quam huic meæ methodo suffragantem habeam, qui eam intimius per omnia perspexerat, utrique nostrum conjunctissimum Dominum Johannem Lock; quo quidem viro, sive ingenio judicioque acri et subacto, sive etiam antiquis (hoc est optimis) moribus, vix superiorem quenquam inter eos qui nunc sunt homines repertum iri confido, paucissimos certe pares. Referring to this when noticing the early training of this "ingenium judiciumque acre et subactum," Dugald Stewart says, with great truth, "No

VOL XIX. NO. II.

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science could have been chosen, more happily calculated than Medicine, to prepare such a mind for the prosecution of those speculations which have immortalized his name; the complicated and fugitive, and often equivocal phenomena of disease, requiring in the observer a far greater proportion of discriminating sagacity than those of Physics, strictly so called; resembling, in this respect, much more nearly, the phenomena about which Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics are conversant.'

Hartley, Mackintosh, and Brown, were physicians; and we know that medicine was a favorite subject with Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, and Berkeley. We wish our young doctors kept more of the company of these and such like men, and knew a little more of the laws of thought, of the nature and rules of evidence, of the general procedure of their own minds in the search after, the proof and the application of, what is true, than, we fear, they generally do. They

* Pinel states, with great precision, the necessity there is for physicians to make the mind of man, as de l'entendement humain, pourroit-elle être ignorée well as his body, their especial study. "L'histoire par le médecin, qui a non-seulement à décrire les vésanies ou maladies morales, et à indiquer toutes leurs nuances, mais encore, qui a besoin de porter la logique la plus sévère pour éviter de donner de la réalité à de termes abstraits pour procéder avec sagesse des idées simples à des idées complexes, et qui a sans cesse sous ses yeux des écrits, où le défaut de

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might do so without knowing less of their Auscultation, Histology, and other good things, than they do, and with knowing them to much better purpose. We wonder, for instance, how many of the century of graduates sent forth from our University every year-armed with microscope, stethoscope, uroscope, pleximeter, &c., and omniscient of rales and rhonchi, sibilous and sonorous; crepitations moist and dry; bruits de rape, de scie, et de soufflet; blood plasmata cytoblasts and nucleated cells, and great in the infinitely little-we wonder how many of these eager and accomplished youths could "unsphere the spirit of Plato," or read with moderate relish and understanding one of the Tusculan Disputations, or who had ever heard of" Butler's Three Sermons on Human Nature," "Berkeley's Minute Philosopher," or of an "Essay on the Conduct of the Understanding," of which Mr. Hallam says, "I cannot think any parent or instructor justified in neglecting to put this little treatise in the hands of a boy about the time that the reasoning faculties become developed," and whose admirable author we shall now endeavor to prove to have been much more one of themselves than is generally supposed. In coming to this conclusion, we have been mainly indebted to the classical, eloquent, and conclusive tract by Lord Grenville, entitled "Oxford and Locke;" to Lord King's life of his great kinsman; to Wood's Athena and Fasti Oxonienses; to the letters from Locke to Drs. Mapletoft, Molyneux, Sir Hans Sloane and Boyle, published in the collected edition of his works; to Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors; and to a very curious collection of letters of Locke, Algernon Sidney, the second Lord Shaftesbury, and others, edited and privately printed by the eccentric Dr. T. Forster.

Le Clerc, in his Eloge upon Locke in the Bibliotheque Choisie, (and in this he has been followed by all subsequent biographers,) states, that when a student at Christ Church, Oxford, he devoted himself with great earnestness to the study of Medicine, but that he never practiced it as his profession, his chief object having been to qualify himself

s'entendre, la séduction de l'esprit de système, et l'abus des expressions vagues et indéterminées ont amené de milliers des volumes et des disputes interminables"-Méthodes d'Etudier en Médecine.

We suppose we shall soon arrive at that exquisite nicety predicted by Mandeville, when our uroscope will enable us to "diagnose" in the product of a Sunday the religion, and in that of a weekday the politics, of our patient.

to act as his own physician, on account of his general feebleness of health and tendency to consumption. To show the incorrectness of this statement, we give the following short notice of his medical studies and practice; it is necessarily slight, but justifies, we think, our assertion in regard to him qua medicus.

LOCKE was born in 1632 at Wrington, Somersetshire, on the 29th of August, the anniversary, as Dr. Forster takes care to let us know, of the Decollation of St. John the Baptist-eight years after Sydenham, and ten before Newton. He left Westminster school in 1651, and entered Christ Church, distinguishing himself chiefly in the departments of medicine and general physics, and greatly enamored of the brilliant and then new philosophy of Descartes.

In connection with Locke's university studies, Anthony Wood, in his autobiography, has the following curious passage: "I began a course of chemistry under the noted chemist and rosicrucian Peter Sthael of Strasburg, a strict Lutheran, and a great hater of women. The club consisted of ten, whereof were Frank Turner, now Bishop of Ely, Benjamin Woodroof, now Canon of Christ Church, and John Locke of the same house, now a noted writer. This same John Locke was a man of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented; while the rest of our club took notes from the mouth of their master, who sat at the upper end of a long table, the said Locke scorned to do this, but was for ever prating and troublesome." This misogynistical rosicrucian was brought over to Oxford by Boyle, and had among his pupils Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Wallis, and Sir Thomas Millington. The fees were three pounds, one half paid in advance.

Locke continued through life greatly addicted to medical and chemical researches. He kept the first regular journal of the weather, and published it from time to time in the Philosophical Transactions, and in Boyle's History of the Air. He used in his observations a barometer, a thermometer, and a hygrometer. His letters to Boyle are full of experiments and speculations about chemistry and medicine; and in a journal kept by him when traveling in France, is this remarkable entry: “M. Toinard produced a large bottle of muscat; it was clear when he set it on the table, but when the stopper was drawn a multitude of little bubbles arose. It comes from this, that the included air had liberty to expand itself;— query, whether this be air new generated. Take a bottle of fermenting liquor, and tie a

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