CULLEN, WILLIAM (1710–1790)

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.

CULLEN, WILLIAM (1710–1790)

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