Sydenham versus Newton: the Edinburgh fever dispute of the 1690s between Andrew Brown and Archibald Pitcairne.

THE BATTLE of our title, between Sydenham and Newton in the Edinburgh of the 1690s, was waged in fact at one remove: by the most doughty physician follower of each of these celebrated figures. Both Sydenham's medical method, and the medical implications of Newton's natural philosophy, were highly topical in 1690. Sydenham had published in 1686 what proved to be his last work (for he died in 1689), while Newton's monumental Principia appeared in print in 1687. The fever dispute between their respective Edinburgh followers offers us a singular opportunity to assess the implications for medical theory and practice of each of these revolutionary approaches. The very fact that we are here dealing with immediate followers who are proselytizing for converts allows us, further, to confront a critical issue in the "transmission" or "influence" of ideas. Why are different individuals attracted to or "influenced by" different ideas? While it may never be possible to answer this question conclusively, it is the contention of this paper that an answer can be approached only after we have contextualized the individuals concerned to the limits of the available evidence. The central source for the present dispute the source in which the ideas in question are presented is a series of some thirty books and pamphlets issued between 1691 and 1702, which have been endearingly described as a bundle of "dreary unreadable rubbish".' Our concern is only with the first dozen pieces of this rubbish, covering the most important stages of the dispute between the partisans of Sydenham and Newton. (These are listed in the Appendix.) It is perhaps surprising that this battle was fought out not in London but in Edinburgh which had never previously witnessed intellectual contention on a medical issue. It had, to put it bluntly, been a sleepy backwater. But the professional context of