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The Sydenhams

The most famous of the Sydenham's was Thomas. Born in 1624 he had attended Oxford University for less than a year before volunteering for duty in Cromwell's cavalry to fight the Royalists. It was four strife-filled years before he returned to his university studies which culminated in a bachelor's degree in medicine in 1646

London then beckoned him; and for four busy decades - which witnessed the Restoration, the Great Fire of London and the Great Bubonic Plague - Sydenham conducted a flourishing practice based upon the novel thought that "the art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice."

In the course of these years his prolific writings included the first clinical descriptions of scarlet fever, pleurisy, chorea minor, hysteria and particularly the disease with which he was personally afflicted: gout. His writings established him eventually as the greatest student of the natural evolution of illnesses and his meticulous descriptions were models of expository clarity for future generations of clinicians. Despite his reputation as the father of bedside clinical medicine, Sydenham was neither a scholar nor an experimentalist. He deplored any references to the medical classics, regarding them as withered remnants of fanciful dogma. All of his writings were initially in English and only then translated to Latin. Nor did he have much respect for basic sciences, regarding them as irrelevancies. He was, for example, a contemporary of William Harvey, but never saw fit to meet with the great physiologist

A colleague, Dr John Browne described him as , 'the prince of practical medicine, whose character is as beautiful and as genuinely English as his name' . He died, after a distinguished career, at his house in Pall Mall on the 29th December 1689 , aged 65 . He is buried in St James Churchyard, Piccadilly. A memorial stone dedicated to Thomas can be found halfway up the staircase of St James Church, Pall Mall. It was put there by the now defunct 'Sydenham Society’.

During his lifetime, the man who is now called the English Hippocrates, had not been accorded a single hospital staff appointment, was never chosen to grace any medical school faculty, and was not accorded fellowships either to the Royal College of Physicians or the Royal Society. Such was the blindness of seventeenth century English medicine. In possible expiation, there is now a grand marble bust of Thomas Sydenham enhancing the front lobby of the Royal College of Physicians. It faces the side windows, however, so that his unblinking gaze neither embarrasses nor causes the current Fellows to fidget as they enter.

Meanwhile back at Wynford Eagle in 1661 Thomases nephew William at the age of 21 had inherited the estate upon his grandfathers death, a few months after that of his father. William's inheritance had been greatly reduced as much of the family wealth had been expended during the Civil War. However the following year, 1662 he married Martha Michel of nearby Kingston Russell and they had a family of two sons and two daughters.

By the early 1690's William Sydenham, despite having achieved high office like his father before him, (as Squire of the Body to William III), was deeply in debt and both his sons had died. William appears to have begun mortgaging the Wynford Estates from 1690 onwards and maybe as early as 1684