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William Cullen
| History 1450-1789: William Cullen |
Cullen, William (1710–1790), British scientist and academic physician. Cullen was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, the second oldest son of a steward working for the duke of Hamilton. His mother was a Robertson of Whistlebury. In 1741 he married Anna Johnstone, daughter of the minister of Kilbarchan, and they had seven sons and four daughters.
Cullen began his education at the Hamilton Grammar School and went on in 1727 to the University of Glasgow; he also served an apprenticeship with a well-known surgeon, John Paisley. At age nineteen, he went to London, where he obtained an appointment as a ship's surgeon on a merchant vessel bound for the West Indies. On his return, Cullen apprenticed with a London apothecary, going home in 1730 to settle family affairs and briefly practice in the parish of Shotts. Two years later, he resumed his studies, then attended medical courses at the University of Edinburgh during the winter sessions of 1734–1735 and 1735–1736 before starting surgical practice in Hamilton. Employed by the duke and duchess of Hamilton and other prominent families, Cullen became involved in local agriculture and manufacturing issues and developed interests in chemistry and linen bleaching.
After obtaining his M.D. degree from the University of Glasgow in 1740, Cullen remained in that city in 1744 and began teaching medicine as an extramural lecturer. Two years later, the university appointed him to teach both medicine and materia medica, and in 1747 offered him an independent lectureship in chemistry together with a research laboratory. Cullen's academic career in Glasgow culminated in 1751 with his appointment to the chair of medicine. Lack of resources and advancement prompted him to leave for Edinburgh, where the Town Council in 1755 appointed him professor of chemistry and medicine at the local university. A year later, he also agreed to teach botany and materia medica. His teaching soon attracted many students and solidified his reputation.
Cullen's penchant for explaining the phenomena of health and disease with the aid of speculative medical theories that challenged the Boerhaavian system then in vogue created tensions among Edinburgh academics and their sponsors. This led to his appointment in 1766 to the chair of medical theory instead of medical practice. However, Cullen and the new incumbent, John Gregory (1724–1773), agreed to give alternate courses in the theory and in the practice of medicine, an arrangement that lasted until Gregory's death in 1773. Until his retirement in 1789, Cullen remained the University of Edinburgh's incumbent professor of Practice of Physic.
In Scotland, Cullen was an important pioneer in the transformation of chemistry into an independent scientific discipline by separating it from its close relationship with medicine. On the theoretical side, he was quite interested in theories of heat, the phenomenon of evaporation, and the property of salts, but he experimented and published little. Instead, Cullen was instrumental in promoting the practical value of chemistry for Scottish agriculture, mining, and brewing, also making useful proposals for the manufacture and purification of common salt and the bleaching of linens. In medicine, he was also known as a systematist, promoting a coherent theory of human physiology and pathology. His scheme was an eclectic combination of previous mechanical and chemical explanations of bodily functioning, now placed under the direction of the nervous system.
Among Cullen's major works was the Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae, published in 1769, a useful and widely employed classification of diseases based on clinical symptoms and signs. He considered it a heuristic device useful to practitioners and students. His most important publication was the First Lines of the Practice of Physic, published and expanded to include four volumes between 1776 and 1784. It was translated into several languages and made him an authority in medical practice throughout Europe and America.
Cullen was a transitional figure. As with other system builders before him, his medical theories became rapidly obsolete as new anatomical and physiological views transformed our understanding of the human body. Likewise, his disease classification was soon replaced by other schemes based on new criteria such as pathological changes discovered in human tissues and organs. Nevertheless, Cullen was widely admired and remembered as a gifted teacher, one of the first to lecture in the vernacular. He was the architect of clinical teaching in Edinburgh, and his reputation attracted students from around the globe.
Bibliography
Doig, Andrew, et al., eds. William Cullen and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Edinburgh, 1993.
Thomson, John. An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen M.D. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1859.
—GUENTER B. RISSE
| Wikipedia: William Cullen |
For other persons named William Cullen, see William Cullen
(disambiguation).
William Cullen (15 April 1710 – 5 February 1790) was a Scottish doctor and chemist.
Timeline
- 1710: Born, Hamilton, Lanarkshire
- 1726: General Studies University of Glasgow
- 1734: Studies Medicine University of Edinburgh
- 1740: Awarded Doctor of Medicine degree from Glasgow University
- 1747: Awarded Britain's first independent lectureship in Chemistry
- 1747: Elected President of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow
- 1751: Appointed to the Chair of Medicine at the University of Glasgow
- 1755: Appointed Professor of Chemistry and Medicine, Edinburgh
- 1766: Appointed to the chair of Institutes (theory) of Medicine in Edinburgh
- 1773: Becomes sole Professor of Physic in Edinburgh
- 1773: Appointed First Physician to the King in Scotland
- 1773: Elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh
- 1777: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London
- 1783: Founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
- 1790: Cullen died at the 5th of February
Origins
Cullen was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire. He studied at Hamilton Grammar School, then, in 1726, began a General Studies arts course at the University of Glasgow. He began his medical training as apprentice to John Paisley, a Glasgow apothecary surgeon, then spent 1729 as 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 establish himself in 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 was one of the founders of the Royal Medical Society.
In 1736 he began medical practise in Hamilton, where he rapidly acquired a high reputation. He also continued his study of the
natural sciences, especially of
Glasgow
In Glasgow he gave extramural lectures, for the University, on physiology, botany, materia medica, and chemistry. His great abilities, enthusiasm, and use of practical demonstrations for instruction, made him a successful and highly popular teacher, attracting large classes. At the same time he also practised physic. In 1747 he was appointed to a lectureship in chemistry. Cullen was a diligent, but unoriginal, investigator and experimenter. However, he encouraged original research among his pupils, one of whom was Joseph Black. In 1751 he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Medicine, but continued to also lecture on chemistry.
Edinburgh
In 1755 he was enticed by Lord Kames to become Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. It was in Edinburgh, in 1756, that he gave a practical demonstration of artificial refrigeration[1] (though he had carried out similar experiments at the University of Glasgow in 1748[citation needed]). Cullen used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of ethyl ether, which then boiled , absorbing heat from the surroundings. This created a small amount of ice, but the process found no commercial application.
From 1757 he delivered lectures on clinical medicine in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
On the death of Charles Alston in 1760, Cullen at the request of the students undertook to finish his course of lectures on materia medica; he delivered an entirely new course, notes of which were published in an unauthorized edition in 1771, but which he re-wrote and issued as A Treatise on Materia Medica in 1789.
On the death of Robert Whytt, the professor of the institutes of medicine, Cullen accepted the chair, at the same time resigning that of chemistry. In the same year he had been an unsuccessful candidate for the professorship of the practice of physic (medicine), but subsequently an arrangement was made between him and John Gregory, the successful candidate, by which they both agreed to deliver alternate courses on the theory and practice of medicine. This arrangement continued until the sudden death of Gregory in 1773. Cullen was then appointed sole professor of the practice of physic, and he continued in this office until a few months before his death.
Works
His chief works were First Lines of the Practice of Physic; Institutions of Medicine (1710): and Synopsis
Nosologiae Methodicae (1785), which contained his classification of diseases into four great classes (1) Pyrexiae, or
febrile diseases, as typhus fever; (2) Neuroses, or nervous diseases, as
Family
Cullen's eldest son Robert became a Scottish judge in 1796 under the title of Lord Cullen later Baron Cullen[1], and was known for his powers of mimicry.
Biography
The first volume of an account of Cullen's Life, Lectures and Writings was published by Dr John Thomson in 1832, and was reissued with the second volume (completing the work) by Drs W. Thomson and D. Craigie in 1859.
External links
- Extracts from Senatus Minutes, University of Glasgow
- Biography by W. P. Doyle at University of Edinburgh, School of Chemistry
- Biography, qualifications, sources at Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology & the Environment
References
- ^ William Cullen, Of the Cold Produced by Evaporating Fluids and of Some Other Means of Producing Cold, in Essays and Observations Physical and Literary Read Before a Society in Edinburgh and Published by Them, II, (Edinburgh 1756)
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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