EARLY LIFE
Scottish physician and professor of medicine William Cullen was born April 15, 1710 in Hamilton, Lankanshire, Scotland. He was primarily educated at the Hamilton Grammar School, in the same town where the duke of Hamilton had employed Cullen's father, a lawyer. In 1726, Cullen attended the University of Glasgow, where he studied under British surgeon John Paisley. Three years later, Cullen served as the surgeon on a English merchant vessel that sailed from London to the West Indies. When he returned to London, Cullen took a position as an assistant to a local apothecary and remained there until 1732, by which time he returned home to Scotland and started his own medical practice near the village of Shotts in Lankanshire. Two years later, Edward Cullen attended the medical school in Edinburgh and two years after that returned to his private practice, where he remained for eight more years, caring, without charge, for those too poor to pay for his services. He went on to get his. M.D. from Glasgow and then was given permission to give a series of lectures throughout the U,K. and Europe. Cullen returned to Edinburgh, obtaining appointment to the chair of the institutes of medicine and rising to the position of sole professor of medicine, which he kept until shortly before his death in 1790.
CONTRIBUTIONS
An excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica's page of William Cullen describes his contribution to the world of 18th century public health:
"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.
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."
