William Cullen

William Cullen (born April 15, 1710, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scot.—died Feb. 5, 1790, Kirknewton, near Edinburgh) was a Scottish physician and professor of medicine, best known for his innovative teaching methods.

Cullen received his early education at Hamilton Grammar School, in the town where he was born and where his father, a lawyer, was employed by the duke of Hamilton. In 1726 Cullen went to the University of Glasgow, where he became a student of British surgeon John Paisley. In 1729 Cullen was hired to serve as ship’s surgeon aboard a merchant vessel sailing from London to the West Indies. Upon his return to London, he took a post as an assistant to a local apothecary. Cullen remained in London until 1732, when he ventured home to Scotland and established his own medical practice near the village of Shotts in Lanarkshire (now North Lanarkshire). In 1734 he attended the new medical school at Edinburgh, returning to his private practice in Hamilton two years later. He spent eight years in private clinical practice, attending without fee those too poor to afford his services. In 1740 he received an M.D. from Glasgow, and several years later he obtained permission to deliver a series of independent lectures on chemistry and medicine, the first to be offered in Great Britain. He was elected to the chair of medicine at Glasgow in 1751. In 1755 Cullen returned to the University of Edinburgh, where he was later appointed to the chair of the institutes (theory) of medicine and eventually became sole professor of medicine, the position he held until shortly before his death. In 1777 Cullen was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Cullen was considered a progressive thinker for his time. He was the first to demonstrate in public the refrigeration effects of evaporative cooling, a phenomenon he wrote of in “Of the Cold Produced by Evaporating Fluids and of Some Other Means of Producing Cold” (Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary, vol. 2 [1756]). In medicine he taught that life was a function of nervous energy and that muscle was a continuation of nerve. He organized an influential classification of disease (nosology) consisting of four major divisions: pyrexiae, or febrile diseases; neuroses, or nervous diseases; cachexiae, diseases arising from bad bodily habits; and locales, or local diseases. This system, which Cullen described in his work Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (1769), was based on the observable symptoms that arise from disease and that are utilized for diagnosis.

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Cullen was most famous, however, for his innovative teaching methods and forceful, inspiring lectures, which drew medical students to Edinburgh from throughout the English-speaking world. He was one of the first to teach in English rather than in Latin, and he delivered his clinical lectures in the infirmary, lecturing not from a text but from his own notes. His First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1777) was widely used as a textbook in Britain and the United States.

Many of Cullen’s pupils went on to make important contributions to science and medicine. Among his most well-known students were British chemist and physicist Joseph Black, known for the rediscovery of “fixed air” (carbon dioxide); English physician William Withering, known for his medical discoveries concerning the use of extracts of foxglove (Digitalis purpurea); British physician John Brown, who was a propounder of the “excitability” theory of medicine; and American physician and political leader Benjamin Rush, who, in addition to being a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was known for his advocacy for the humane treatment of the insane.