William Cullen

William Cullen (1710-1790) was the leading British physician of the 18th century, Cullen held chairs in chemistry, theory of medicine, and practice of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He recognised the importance of the mind in healing, and was the first to describe the value of administering placebo treatments ; the American poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was named after him.

Cullen was born in Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, Scotland on April 15th 1710; his father was a lawyer, on special retainer to the Duke of Hamilton. After attending Hamilton Grammar School, Cullen began a General Studies arts course at the University of Glasgow in 1726.

He began his medical training as an apprentice to John Paisley, a Glasgow apothecary surgeon, then spent 1729 as a surgeon on a merchant vessel trading between London and the West Indies. After two years as assistant apothecary to Mr Murray of Henrietta Street, London, he returned to Scotland in 1732 to enter general medical practice in the parish of Shotts, Lanarkshire. From 1734 to 1736 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he became interested in chemistry, and he was one of the founders of the Royal Medical Society.

In 1736 he began medical practise in Hamilton, where he soon acquired a good reputation, and treated those to poor to pay without charge. In 1740 Cullen was awarded the degree of M.D. from Glasgow University. In 1741, he married and started his family. He became ordinary medical attendant to James Douglas, 5th Duke of Hamilton (1703-43), his family, and his livestock. In 1744, after the Duke's death, the Cullens moved to Glasgow.

While working in private medical practise, Cullen had continued his study of the natural sciences, especially of chemistry. In 1747, he was awarded Britain's first independent lectureship in Chemistry and was elected President of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. In 1751 he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Medicine, but continued to also lecture on chemistry. In 1766 he was appointed to the chair of Institutes (theory) of Medicine atEdinburgh University and then became the sole Professor of Physic in Edinburgh. In 1755 he was enticed by Lord Kames to become Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at the University. In 1756 he gave the first documented public demonstration of artificial refrigeration; he used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether, which then boiled , absorbing heat from the surroundings.

From 1757 he delivered lectures on clinical medicine in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. When Charles Alston died in 1760, Cullen took over his course of lectures on materia medica; he delivered an entirely new course, the notes for which were eventually published as A Treatise on Materia Medica in 1789.

In 1773 he was appointed First Physician to the King in Scotland and elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. In 1777 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and in 1783 he became a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

His major published works were First Lines of the Practice of Physic; Institutions of Medicine (1710): and Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (1785), which classified diseases into four major classes (1) Pyrexiae, or febrile diseases, as typhus fever; (2) Neuroses, or nervous diseases, as epilepsy; (3) Cachexiae, or diseases resulting from bad habit of body, as scurvy; and (4) Locales, or local diseases, as cancer <blockquote"In the living man, there is an immaterial thinking fubftance, or MIND, constantly present ; and every phenomenon of thinking is to be confidered as an affection or fa- dulty of the mind alone. But this immaterial and thinking part of man is so connected with the material and corporeal part of him, and particularly with the nervous system, that motions excited in this give occasion to thought; and thought, however occasioned, gives occasion to new motions in the nervous system. This mutual communication , or influence we affirm with confidence as a fact : But the mode of it we do not understand, nor pretend to explain ; and therefore are not bound to obviate the difficulties that attend any of the suppositions which have

been made concerning it."

Cullen died on February 5th, 1790, at Kirknewton, near Edinburgh