- Title
- John Locke, Thomas Sydenham and the authorship of two medical essays
- Creator
- Anstey, Peter; Burrows, John
- Relation
- Electronic British Library Journal Vol. 2009
- Relation
- http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2009articles/article3.html
- Publisher
- British Library
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Amongst the Shaftesbury Papers in the National Archives are two short medical essays in the hand of the English philosopher John Locke. One is entitled ‘Anatomia’ and from its endorsement we know that it was composed in 1668. The other is endorsed ‘Ars Medica 1669’ and ‘De Arte med[ica] 1669’. Thus these two essays pre-date the early drafts of Locke’s most important philosophical work An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). The early drafts of the Essay, drafts A and B, were composed in 1671. As it happens, the contents of the earlier medical essays are not only extremely interesting in their own right but may bear importantly on both our understanding of Locke’s own intellectual development and on the origins of the Essay itself. However, any analysis of the contents of these medical essays is complicated by the fact that since the mid-1960s some scholars have attributed their authorship to the London physician and friend of Locke, Thomas Sydenham.The resolution of the question of the authorship of ‘Anatomia’ and ‘De arte medica’ has recently been described as ‘one of the most difficult tasks of Locke scholarship’. It is the purpose of this study to lay the question of authorship to rest by providing a fresh analysis of the arguments for and against Sydenham’s authorship and Locke’s authorship, and by applying the latest techniques of computational stylistics to the texts themselves.
- Subject
- John Locke; Thomas Sydenham; authorship; medical essays
- Identifier
- uon:8238
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/917229
- Identifier
- ISSN:1478-0259
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