Category Archives: Research

It has long been assumed that the 1772 edition of Cullen’s textbook on the Institutions of Medicine, entitled Institutions of Medicine. Part I. Physiology. For the Use of the Students in the University of Edinburgh, was the first one Cullen printed.

But I have discovered, quite to my surprise, that this is not the case. Cullen in fact printed an earlier version of this textbook in 1770, and I have located what must be one of the only surviving copies.

In a certain sense, this is not a revelation. From fairly detailed and well-preserved student notes taken down during his 1770-71 lectures (see NLS MS 3535), we know that he gave his students some kind of text and that it appeared to be, at least in the parts that discussed the nervous system, very similar to—but not identical with—his published text from two years later.

While re-reading these lectures, I realised that Cullen clearly indicates that he has handed out a printed textbook to his students in 1770, one that he published (for, he says, he hazards his reputation by doing so). So I wondered whether any such book still survives. And, after some searching, I discovered that, yes, a copy exists in one—but, as far as I can tell, only one—library.

I still need to confirm that it is what the catalogue claims it is (I have ordered some images), but I am 95% certain that a copy of Cullen’s 1770 textbook survives. From NLS MS 3535, we already have a good sense of its contents, but to find the actual ‘published’ edition, which must be exceedingly rare, is a treat.

And it leads to a further query, for we know that Cullen handed out some kind of text or lengthy syllabus to his students as early as his 1768-69 Institutions course. I believe this was the first time he did so, with a view to publication. But it is unclear whether this text was ‘published’ in the same way that the later ones were. Cullen may have simply handed out pages in loose-leaf, for example. But he may have printed his 1768-69 text, and I am now on the lookout for that too. But, if it survives, it must be extremely rare and probably only survives among the collected papers of some of his students.

All of this material, I hope, feeds into the chapter(s) I am writing on Cullen’s views of the nervous system, and how they developed over the course of his lectures on the Institutions of Medicine. And that can be seen quite clearly in the different editions or variations that his textbook underwent from 1768 to 1772.

At the Cullen Symposium, I mentioned that, among other reasons, one of the ways we know that Dr. Cullen actually met Benjamin Franklin is because the Rev. Alexander ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle (1722-1805)—he acquired the nickname ‘Jupiter’, apparently, on account of his commanding good looks—rather non-chalantly mentions just such a meeting. In fact, in my mind, the meet-up that Carlyle mentions has always seemed to me to be a rather powerful example of the Scottish Enlightenment in action. Someone came up to me after the panel was over and wanted to know the specific reference where this meeting is mentioned, and it occurred to me that perhaps it was not as well-known as I assumed. So, I shall mention it here, along with a few other items of interest regarding the relationship between Franklin and Cullen.

Carlyle wrote an autobiography of his life during his final years, but it was published for the first time, if I’m not mistaken, in 1860 by John Hill Burton, based on Carlyle’s manuscript. I have to admit to being fairly ignorant of the details, but it is to the content I wish to draw attention.

I note, as well, that Carlyle’s memory cannot be entirely trusted here. But more on that below. Let us first enjoy the anecdote. Carlyle recalls that about the middle of September (1770), he and his friend a Dr. Wight (from Dublin):

supped one night in Edinburgh with the celebrated Dr Franklin at Dr Robertson’s house, then at the head of the Cowgate, where he had come at Whitsunday, after his being translated to Edinburgh. Dr Franklin and his son [William Franklin (c. 1730-1814)] with him; and besides Wight and me, there were David Hume, Dr Cullen, Adam Smith, and two or three more. Wight and Franklin had met and breakfasted together in the inn at [   ] without learning one another’s names, but they were more than half acquainted when they met here. Wight, who could talk at random on all sciences without being very deeply skilled in any, took it into his head to be very eloquent on chemistry, a course of which he had attended in Dublin; and perceiving that he diverted the company, particularly Franklin, who was a silent man, he kept it up with Cullen, then professor of that science, who had imprudently committed himself with him, for the greatest part of the evening, to the infinite diversion of the company, who took great delight in seeing the great Professor foiled in his own science by a novice. Franklin’s son was open and communicative, and pleased the company better than his father; and some of us observed indications of that decided difference of opinion between father and son which, in the American war, alienated them altogether.¹

Here we have, on a particular evening at William Robertson’s house, a remarkable gathering of minds. William Robertson, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, William Cullen, and David Hume, all together, one entertaining evening. Note that Carlyle seems to find Franklin’s presence, as an out-of-towner, noteworthy, but not the gathering of Robertson, Hume, Smith and Cullen at the same dinner. To him, this was not unusual; these sorts of gatherings, in Edinburgh at the time, were presumably not very uncommon. But to us, looking back, we are reminded of the sheer concentration of singular figures that enjoyed each other’s company and conviviality, in the Scottish capital. When we speak of the Scottish Enlightenment, I, at least, think of moments like this.

I do not know what axe Carlyle had to grind against Cullen—though it may have been on religious grounds or, more likely, on account of Carlyle’s friendship with Dr. John Gregory, who was often at loggerheads with Cullen—but he clearly enjoys poking fun at him here. Now, it must be said that Carlyle’s chronology can’t be correct, and one wonders how much to trust his version of events. Perhaps he is really combining a few evenings into one, and that no such dinner in mid-September 1770 took place. I have no doubt that these kinds of evenings happened, especially during Franklin’s visits, but I’m unsure whether we can say that this particular one did. For the moment, let’s give Carlyle the benefit of the doubt.

Still, there are concerns: to begin, Carlyle is mistaken about Cullen’s position. In 1770 he was no longer Professor of Chemistry and had not been for at least 5 years. He became Professor of the Theory of Physic in 1766 or thereabouts. He had been Professor of Chemistry from 1756-1766 in Edinburgh (without here worrying about precise dates to the month). So either this evening happened earlier than 1770, when Cullen was in fact Professor of Chemistry, or it happened in 1770, but Carlyle was mistaken as to Cullen’s position. I suspect, since the entertainment of the story hinges so much on Dr. Wight making a fool of Cullen in chemistry, while he was Professor of that very subject, that it is the former—i.e. that the evening in question, if it happened in this way, took place earlier than 1770.

In fact, there is an easy way to put a rough estimate on the evening in question, for Franklin came to visit Edinburgh twice, once in 1759 and again in 1771. During his 1759 visit, he stayed at the estate of Lord Kames in the Scottish Borders (Kaimes). He appears to have stayed for about six weeks, which ended sometime before the new year, based on Franklin’s letter to Kames, dated Jan. 3, 1760 from London, of which I excerpt below:

Our Conversation till we came to York was chiefly a Recollection and Recapitulation of what we had seen and heard, the Pleasure we had enjoy’d and the Kindnesses we had receiv’d in Scotland, and how far that Country had exceeded our Expectations. On the whole, I must say, I think the Time we spent there, was Six Weeks of the densest Happiness I have met with in any Part of my Life. And the agreable and instructive Society we found there in such Plenty, has left so pleasing an Impression on my Memory, that did not strong Connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the Country I should chuse to spend the Remainder of my Days in.²

During the time Franklin was staying with Lord Kames, Cullen was Professor of the Practice of Chemistry, so it is possible that Carlyle’s dinner occurred in late 1759, instead of 1770. More support is lent to this date, if we consider the whereabouts of Franklin’s son, William. It was likely he was traveling with his father in 1759, but he became Colonial Governor of New Jersey in 1763 and continued in that post until January 1776. It is possible, though unlikely, that he would have been traveling in Edinburgh in the early 1770s. Someone has probably already figured this out, but this suggests strongly to me that the evening Carlyle remembers happened in late 1759 instead of sometime in 1770.

It is worth mentioning that Cullen definitely meant and conversed with Franklin during his first trip to Edinburgh. Not only does Franklin begin a correspondence with Cullen in 1760 (alas, it is quite small, consisting of three letters—two of which are simple letters of introduction—as far as I am aware), but he (Franklin) specifically mentions, in a letter to Cullen from London dated Oct. 21st, 1761, that

I hear, that since I had the pleasure of seeing and conversing with you on the subject, you have wrote some of your sentiments of Fire, and communicated them to the Philosophical Society. If so, as it may be some time before their publication, I should think myself extremely obliged to you if I could be favoured with a copy, as there is no subject I am more impatient to be acquainted with. It should go no further than my own closet without your permission.³

During his 1771 visit (which began in late October 1771), Franklin stayed with David Hume at his home in the New Town.⁴

It would certainly be interesting to know more about the relationship between Franklin and Cullen. Cullen clearly had a deep respect for Franklin; and he mentions in some unpublished letters to his American pupils, that he was always very proud of his friendship with Franklin, and the many civilities they engaged over the years. It is surprising to me that there are not more extant letters between the two of them, but then Cullen could—and did—communicate with Franklin in his later years via his many American pupils who settled in Philadelphia and knew Franklin well (John Morgan, William Shippen, Benjamin Rush, etc). A letter from John Morgan, in 1786 for instance, mentions Cullen’s “old friend Dr Franklin.”⁵

It is also becoming clear that Franklin’s work on electricity played an important role in Cullen’s thinking on certain topics (as, indeed, it did with many philosophers and physicians in the mid-to-late eighteenth century). But that is not something I can explore here.

I am inaugurating a new section on william cullen dot net, dedicated to, as I explain on that page, “descriptions of, and links to, ‘original’ resources helpful (I hope) to those studying the life and thought of William Cullen. By ‘original’ I mean, essentially, resources that I have either created myself or that I have edited or enhanced in some significant way, for the use of others.”

These are various side projects, or background work, which I have dedicated some attention to over the past 2+ years, while studying Cullen. I have some projects in the wings, as well, that I plug away at, as time permits (but it usually doesn’t, and certainly won’t over the next few months).

But, for now, go on over and check out the new section Originals.

This is a follow-up to my post from March 20, 2012 (‘Clinical Lectures, Published in 1797′)

I believe I have identified the student who transcribed notes taken during Cullen’s 1765-6 clinical lectures, which then became the source for the (in)famous 1797 publication. The student’s name was Robert Marshall and his handwritten notes are currently held in the Coller Rare Book Room at the New York Academy of Medicine Library. My record for this volume reads: “Lectures on physiology, for the year 1766/7. [Edinburgh, 1766-67], v.p. 23.5cm. Notes taken by a student, Robert Marshall. Contains his clinical lectures.” And, indeed, the contents verify this information, and the clinical lectures referred to match the content of those subsequently published in 1797.

If the Preface to the 1797 publication is accurate, it suggests that Marshall was already a well-known physician at the time of the lectures and that he took down his notes in short-hand.¹

I have no idea how these lecture notes ended up in the United States. That is a separate tale. But I want to wonder, very briefly, about Robert Marshall himself. What do we know about him?

First, there are a couple of letters from a Robert Marshall of Glasgow to Cullen (Oct 15, 1779; June 27, 1782; Dec 4, 1787; Aug 11, 1788).²

Second, there is a listing for a Robert Marshall in the Memorials of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow 1599-1850 (1896). He is described as ”A contemporary of Dr. Wright in Glasgow” and as “a man of scholarly attainments, [who] also lived into the present century [i.e. the 19th].”³ In the listing at the back, his degrees and posts are given: “Entered in 1766 as a physician. M.A. Glasgow, 1749; M.D. Glasgow, 1765. President 1769-71, 1779-81, 1787-89. Residence in Argyle Street.”⁴ He would thus have had a chance to get to know Cullen, while he (Marshall) was a master’s student at Glasgow. Presumably, he then decided to sit in on Cullen’s classes in Edinburgh during, at a minimum, the 1765-6 academic session for Cullen’s Clinical Lectures, and then during the 1766-67 session for Cullen’s very first set of lectures on the Institutions of Medicine, before moving to Glasgow and joining the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons in 1766. If this is the Robert Marshall we’re after, then this means he had already obtained his M.D. before attending Cullen’s clinical lectures (which is perhaps why he is referred to as ‘eminent Physician’ in the Preface cited above). As far as note-takers go, he is (was?) a very good one for the historian to have.

It would be nice to pin down Marshall’s birth and death dates. Presuming an M.A. in 1749, he was probably born not much later than the mid-1730s. It was suggested by the author of the Memorials that Marshall lived into the present century, i.e. the 19th. But I believe this is mistaken and that he must have been mixed up with the surgeon, Robert Marshall of Peebles, who died in 1801. For it appears that the Robert Marshall of Glasgow, the eminent Physician, died in 1788, if this death notice (Dec 14, 1788) from The Scots Magazine is accurate. The last letter from Dr. Marshall to Cullen that survives is dated Aug 11, 1788, so that presents no problems. But, according to the Memorials, his last stint as President of the GFPS ended in 1789. Since the stints were traditionally of 2 years tenure, I’m not sure that this shows that Dr. Marshall must have still been alive in 1789 (rather than until the last two weeks of 1788). But this does present some uncertainty, worthy of further investigation.

Yet it would be nice to know Marshall’s death year with more certainty because then we would know if he were personally behind the 1797 publication. If he lived into the 19th century, then perhaps so. If he died in late 1788, as I suspect, then he clearly was not. Someone else, perhaps a colleague in Glasgow or someone else who had access to his papers after his death—and, importantly, who also shared Marshall’s apparent admiration for Cullen—may have been behind it instead. And this, to me, jives with the suspicion that Allen Thomson harboured about the book not being authentic.⁵. Thomson may have been half-right; it was not authentic in that the author of its contents had no hand in its publication. But, as I have already shown, Thomson was wrong about its inauthenticity with respect to content. It does, in fact, provide exactly what it claims to. It is, or ought to be, a part of the very short list of published works that provide authentic material from Cullen’s lectures.

Thank you, Dr. Robert Marshall of Glasgow.

Cullen, in his lectures on the Institutions of Medicine, speaks favourably of one of his pupils (and friends), a certain Mr. Thomas Smith. Smith published an Inaugural Dissertation in 1767 entitled de Actione Musculari to obtain his M.D. from Edinburgh.

About Smith, Bynum tells us (drawing on information given to him, it seems, by Mike Barfoot) that Cullen “was himself no experimentalist, and most of his new experimental evidence was taken from the 1767 thesis of a student of his, Thomas Smith, entitled De Actione Musculari. Little is known of Smith except that he came from Staffordshire, and that he enrolled in a number of classes in Edinburgh between 1757 and 1767, being particularly fond of Cullen’s chemistry classes. It has been impossible to identify him with any certainty after 1767.”¹

There is another interesting reference to Smith and his dissertation in Alexander Monro secundus‘ book Observations on the Structure and Functions of the Nervous System, Illustrated with Tables (1783), where he suggests that Smith got his ideas from him, while attending his lectures in 1764.²

John Thomson tells us a bit more about Smith. He lists Smith as one of the medical students “who seem to have enjoyed a large share of Dr Cullen’s notice and favour.”³ He describes Smith in these terms: “Dr Thomas Smith, who acquired great reputation by the inaugural dissertation on the Motion of the Muscles, which he published on graduating at Edinburgh in 1767, and who settled as a practitioner at Birmingham.”⁴

The connection to Birmingham is quite helpful. The Medical Register for the Year 1783 lists Thomas Smith, along with 3 other physicians (including two other Edinburgh graduates, William Withering (Edin. 1766) and Edward Johnstone (Edin, 1779)), as attendants to the General Hospital at Birmingham.

Smith ‘Resigned or Died’, according to subsequent records of the Birmingham General Hospital, in March 1801—although I have not been able to verify this from other sources.

I do not have time at the moment to pursue any more sources about Smith, but I thought it would be nice to highlight the sketchy facts about his life that are readily available. And, when I have more time, I would love to take a closer look at his dissertation to see, for instance, if there is evidence of Cullen’s own hand at work.

In Mike Barfoot’s “Philosophy and Method in Cullen’s Medical Teaching,” he makes an interesting claim in one of his footnotes (Note 16):

Some of the best student transcriptions of Cullen’s institutes lectures come from this period. For example, see ‘Lectures on the institutions of medicine by Dr Cullen, 1771-2’, NLS MS 3535.¹ It has recently been suggested that this is in Cullen’s hand and can therefore serve as a preferred text for understanding Cullen’s views. See Wright, J. P., ‘Metaphysics and physiology: mind, body and the animal economy in eighteenth-century Scotland’…It is worth emphasising that Cullen always lectured from notes only, and where we do have lectures written in his own hand they are in note form. There are essays on specific doctrines such as fever, the vis medicatrix naturae, health, hypochondria, custom and the history of medicine (see ref. 38). However, the fully written-out lecture notes are either student copies, or transcriptions of an amanuensis, some of which have been corrected in Cullen’s distinctive hand. Therefore it is very unlikely that there are any complete transcriptions of Cullen’s lectures solely in his own hand which could serve as a preferred text (127, my emphasis).

Barfoot is right to correct Wright’s view that MS 3535 may well be in Cullen’s handwriting (it is not). And also right to emphasise that many extant ‘fully written-out lecture notes’ are in the form of student copies² or in the hand of an amanuensis.³ But I have come across many examples that probably count as exceptions, and while Barfoot’s point is generally true, it is not as categorical as he suggests.

First of all, it appears that Cullen was in the habit of writing out the introductory lecture—the showcase lecture, if you like—that he delivered during the first meeting of each year. This was usually about a topic of general interest rather than the specific content of the course, and it was one way of enticing his auditors to enroll in his course. I have come across quite a number of these, stretching back to Cullen’s Glasgow days.⁴ These are all in Cullen’s handwriting, written out in full, on unfolded pieces of paper. I suppose we do not know whether Cullen, as Barfoot claims, “always lectured from notes only”, but the above suggests that, whether he actually went into the classroom with fully-written lectures, he certainly was not averse to writing out them out in full. I suspect he was inclined to write out his lectures when he was planning on presenting new material that was not part of his ordinary course (e.g. his introductory and farewell lectures which varied to some degree each session).

There are, of course, many examples of his usual practice of writing out heads of lectures in note form, which he presumably took with him to the lecture hall.⁵ But even among these, one finds quite a variety. Some notes are strictly lecture prompts or bullet points (without the bullet), presumably just to remind Cullen of the general topics or points he wanted to make.⁶ But there are others that come much closer to reading like fully-written lectures. Perhaps they are not strictly so, but they are often written in complete sentences, with transitions, and read very much like full, if sometimes abrupt or condensed, lectures.⁷

So, if this is accurate, we can make some distinctions between kinds of lecture notes. There is a spectrum of sorts. On the short and informal end, there are the simple lecture prompts or bullet points. I will call these ‘lecture prompts’. On the longer and more formal end, there are the fully-written-out lectures, such as the ones Cullen produced for many of his introductory and farewell lectures. These are probably what Barfoot is thinking of when he talks about ‘fully written-out lecture notes’. I will call these ‘written lectures’.

Those are the two ends of the spectrum. But in between we have at least two other kinds worth noting. The most typical appear to be heads of lectures written out in note form. These contain complete sentences and are more flushed out than simple bullet points or lecture prompts. They are perhaps the locus classicus of the genre, and I will call them ‘lecture heads’. Finally, there is a kind of lecture note that, while not being as full or as formal as the ‘written lecture’, nevertheless contains mostly complete sentences, with transitions, and reads almost like an essay or ‘written lecture’ but is less formal and more condensed. I call these ‘condensed lectures’. Thus we have, from simplest to most formal:

(1) Lecture prompts

(2) Lecture heads

(3) Condensed lectures

(4) Written lectures

I don’t know what use can be made of these just yet, but I do think it’s important not to clump all lecture notes into the same category. There are varieties, and whether one kind exists on a particular topic vs. another may well tell us something important about that set of lectures. To give one example, which I may discuss in another post: there is an intriguing set of lecture notes condensed lectures contained in RCPE CUL/2/1/5 about Cullen’s views on the nervous fluid, which may suggest that he recently re-wrote or revamped his lectures on this topic for that academic session.

Greetings from the Washington, DC area! The Mini-Hiatus turned into something a bit longer, but I am now setup in a new environment and deep into research again.

I have sometimes wondered whether it was not a mis-use of my time to spend the summer of 2011 taking digital photos of (almost) the entire run of Cullen Papers held at Special Collections, Glasgow University Library. But then I encounter unexpected dividends to my investment. Last night, for example.

I have been writing a chapter on Cullen’s understanding of Hygiene, or the preservation of health. And in the course of doing so, I have been working with mostly unpublished materials, including MS Cullen 125 and MS Cullen 1113. MS Cullen 125 has this simple description in the catalogue ‘”Remarks on the Art of Preserving Health” by William Cullen’. And, indeed, the first page of the document  (12 pages in total) contains that very title. But at page 9 (f.5r), the handwriting changes and the sense is distorted. It’s obvious that page 9 does not follow from page 8, so one suspects, upon reading, that the final pages of the document come from elsewhere. They seem to make some kind of sense with what came before – which is why they were put there – but clearly there are pages missing. This is not unusual and is the case in many other documents (to expect anything else from an archive of this size and complexity would be unreasonable).

One gets a similar experience reading MS Cullen 1113, which has the catalogue description ‘Part of an essay by William Cullen on the effects of custom. 17–’. Here too, handwriting styles change between some pages, and there are non-sequiturs in sense as well. Again, par for the course, when working in archives. But on a hunch I made a mental note of the ending of page 8 from MS Cullen 125 and discovered, just by luck, that one of the pages in MS Cullen 1113 appeared to make sense if it were preceded by that very page from MS Cullen 125. Intrigued, I did a more thorough comparison of both documents side by side (having created PDFs of each for my own research), and the jigsaw fell into place: these were two drafts of the very same essay!

So, working with the images, I juggled them around to create – or reconstruct, really – a new, virtual document that contains a complete version of Cullen’s essay, entitled “Remarks on the Art of Preserving Health” (and the other document then ‘became’ an earlier draft of the same essay). On the one hand, there is nothing special here: we knew the essay, at least the first few pages of it, existed (MS Cullen 125). On the other hand, it’s wonderful and exciting because we now have the complete essay (31 handwritten pages), where before there was just a jumble, spread over multiple documents. And this was not at all inevitable: those pages could have simply been missing.

It would have been exceedingly difficult to discover this, if I had simply been requesting individual documents from the Cullen Papers and reading them (serially) in person in the Reading Room in Glasgow. A point, then, for working with digital images of archival material.

I have begun work on another chapter, and this one is all about Cullen’s understanding of hygiene, or the preservation of health.

People familiar with the Cullen Papers at Special Collections (Glasgow University Library) – or Mike Barfoot’s footnotes! – know that there is, extant, a lengthy, unpublished and incomplete essay on the art and preservation of health. We have a draft copy of it in Cullen’s handwriting (MS Cullen 335 & 336) and also a full transcription of the draft, incorporating Cullen’s revisions, in William Thomson’s handwriting (MS Cullen 406). It may well be the most substantial piece of unpublished work in Cullen’s handwriting that survives. And yet Thomson does not discuss it, and no secondary sources discuss it in any detail (Stott 1987 has a few sentences), with the exception of Risse’s chapter on the topic, entitled “In the Name of Hygieia and Hippocrates: A Quest for the Preservation of Health and Virtue” (2005).

But this post is not about Risse or even the contents of the unpublished essay. It is about its title. The extant version in Cullen’s handwriting does not come with one. William Thomson’s transcription, however, entitles it “An Essay on the Preservation of Health.” Does this capture the content?

The essay itself consists of two parts. Part I is entitled “Of the Animal Oeconomy” and Part II is entitled “On the preservation of Health.” Was Thomson just using the second part as the title for the whole? Is there any way of knowing what Cullen himself may have called it? And do we know when Cullen was working on it?

In fact, there is a possible answer in one of Benjamin Rush’s letters to Cullen, dated December 22, 1784 and printed in Thomson (Life, v1, 650-1; for the original, see MS Cullen 109):

I want words to convey to you the pleasure I derived from your very friendly letter by Mr Dobson. It has revived in me all that enthusiasm for science with which you inspired me in the years 1766 and 1768. I shall be unhappy till I receive your latest edition of your Nosology and Materia Medica; and I shall not cease to pray that you may not only live to finish your work upon “the art of preserving health,” but that you may stamp a value upon it that shall ensure (not its sale only), but its immortality, by living till you are an hundred years old, and much longer, if it shall please God to continue to you your powers of usefulness and happiness (Thomson, I, 650-1).

Here it appears that Rush quotes – back to Cullen – Cullen’s own title for the essay he was working on. And, in fact, this is probably the source from which Thomson derived his own title because this letter is referred to, in pencil, on the first page of the Introduction in William Thomson’s transcription of it. Does that settle it, then? More or less, but I wanted to track down, if it still survived, the preceding letter that Cullen wrote to Rush in which he presumably mentioned his work of this title.

I contacted the kind folks at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which, in conjunction with the Library Company of Philadelphia, holds the archives for the extant Rush Papers. They sent me some digital scans of a handful of letters from Cullen to Rush that have survived. But I could find no mention in these letters of Cullen’s essay on the preservation of health. I sadly concluded that that particular letter must not have survived or was in the possession of a private collector.

But in the past week, I discovered otherwise! It turns out that the scans I was sent were, for whatever reason, incomplete. I actually went to Philadelphia myself in December of last year and took photos of these letters and a lot of other material held at the HSP/LCP. And I flipped through these on my computer and discovered that I, in fact, had images of the missing pages where Cullen does indeed refer to his work on this topic.

In a letter to Rush dated October 16th, 1784 – which Thomson almost certainly did not have access to – Cullen says (and here, for reasons of copyright, I cannot really quote directly from the manuscript – although I suppose a single phrase is permissible) that he is eager to complete his ‘Treatise on the Preservation of health’ before he dies. 

The letter itself is interesting in a number of ways, including Cullen’s description of his writing projects c. 1784. Thus, the letter also tells us that Cullen was actively working on his Treatise in late 1784 and that he hoped to finish it but was unsure of how long it would take, given how large a work it would have to be. He mentions, as well, that in the next summer – the summer of 1785 – he hoped to write a new edition of his Materia Medica. We know this took considerably longer than that summer and that he would only finish that work in 1789. So, it may well be, that Cullen, beginning in 1785, simply set aside his Treatise to work on his Materia Medica and was never able to return to it. How long Cullen had been working on it, prior to 1784, is hard to say. I would not be surprised if the draft we have extant (approximately 37,000 words – 136 handwritten MS pages) was the product of just one summer of intense work (the summer of 1784). We could, in any case, with some confidence date the Treatise to the years 1783-5, although it might not be possible to narrow it down further. 

The main point of this post, however, is just to say that we now know Cullen’s own title for his unpublished essay: “Treatise on the Preservation of health”.

In the thirty-eighth volume of The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, there is a very illuminating, but anonymous, review of the first volume of John Thomson’s Life of William Cullen. In the literature on Cullen, it is sometimes mentioned but rarely discussed. Instead, Sir William Hamilton’s review of the same book, published anonymously in The Edinburgh Review in July 1832¹ gets the lion share of attention.

But I want to focus attention on the anonymous review. To begin: who wrote it? The only person that mentions this review, if memory serves, is Mike Barfoot. He refers to it in a footnote (footnote 15) in his introduction (1997) to a republished edition of both volumes of Thomson’s biography. He adds a bit more detail in his chapter “Philosophy and Method in Cullen’s Medical Teaching” (1993) in endnote 68, where he writes: “This aspect of Cullen’s thought [Cullen's skeptical approach] was emphasised in an unsigned editorial (Edin. Med. Surg. J. 1832; 38: 384-420), probably by D. Craigie and more fully by him when he completed Thomsons Life (ref. 3 vol. 2: 610)…” (131).²

Setting aside the issue of interpretation, here we have a fairly confident suggestion about who wrote it: David Craigie (1793-1866).³ Craigie graduated M.D. at Edinburgh in 1816 and became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1832. Indeed, he was its President from 1861-3. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He also acted as physician to the Royal Infirmary for a number of years. He published a number of books and papers, dozens of publications in total. For our purposes, it is significant that Craigie became the owner of, and edited himself for many years, The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. It is not clear, from the DNB, which years this encompassed, but we know that Craigie was already doing a lot of work for the EMSJ in 1832, for in the very same issue (No. 113) where the review appears, there are two papers by Craigie (Articles VIII & XII). If I’m not mistaken, no other author has more than one article to his name. This suggests, at least circumstantially, that Craigie was already editing the journal by 1832.

Craigie, of course, already wrote a large chunk of the second half of Volume II of the Life of Cullen. To be precise, he was responsible for page 401 onwards.⁴.

I assume that Barfoot is basing his conjecture on another piece of circumstantial evidence, and that is the similarity of views found in the anonymous review and in Craigie’s contribution to the Life of Cullen. Barfoot emphasises the portrait of Cullen as a skeptical inquirer that one finds in both pieces. I would add to this the emphasis made in both pieces on the originality of Cullen’s contribution to Materia Medica.

All of this points to Craigie’s authorship of the anonymous review. But I have another piece of evidence that I think, in concert with the others, established the identification, even if it still falls short of a declaration by Craigie that he wrote the 1832 review (that, by the way, may still turn up after a thorough examination of the letters between Allen Thomson and David Craigie, held at Glasgow University Library, Special Collections). Consider the statements about Cullen made on pages 675-676 in Volume II of the Life of Cullen, contained in the paragraph that starts, “The leading characters of the intellect of William Cullen were…” (675). A very similar paragraph—essentially verbatim—occurs in the anonymous review, beginning on page 406. Thus, either Craigie plagiarised parts of the anonymous review for his contribution to the Life of Cullen—which would be singularly strange, given how much space is devoted in that volume (including in the parts that Craigie wrote) to showing how John Brown shamefully plagiarised from Cullen’s lectures—or he was just re-using parts of the earlier review, which he himself wrote.

I would confidently conclude the latter: David Craigie was the author of the anonymous (now, no longer!) 1832 review of volume I of Thomson’s Life of Cullen.

Of course, there is still much to say about the content and arguments of the review itself, which I think provides a novel interpretation of Cullen’s importance in the history of medicine, and should be read, in conjunction with Craigie’s contribution to the second volume of the Life. There is a Craigiean interpretation of Cullen, which overlaps with—but is not identical to—the Thomsonian interpretation, which has been lost sight of, I think, for at least two reasons: (i) the 1832 review, which states Craigie’s interpretation more forcefully and concisely than in his later discussion, was written anonymously and not generally linked to Craigie and (ii) Craigie’s interpretation, as provided in Volume II of the Life, was not stated as forcefully as his earlier discussion because it was under the constraints of continuing the work that the Thomsons had already written (and Allen Thomson, in his role as editor, made sure that Craigie did not stray too far from the Thomsonian view).

Let’s recap what we know from my last post. Two South Sea Company ships, both captained by someone named Cleland, set sail from Portsmouth (Spithead), England on November 25, 1730 headed to Porto-Bello.

The Prince William

One ship, the Prince William, reached St. Christopher’s on January 8th, 1731, stayed for 10 days, then set sail (January 18th or thereabouts) for Carthagena, but stayed less than a day. She finally arrived at Porto-Bello on January 31st. She stayed for 5 months and set sail again on July 1st. The Prince William finally returned to England (Dartmouth) on September 9, 1731, loaded with cargo. She may have continued to another port in England at that point, but for our purposes, her journey was complete. Indeed, some of the cargo was off-loaded at Darmouth, along with “some other Gentlemen, who immediately took Post for London.”

The itinerary was as follows:

November 25, 1730 – Set sail from Portsmouth (Spithead)
January 8th, 1731 – Arrived at St. Christopher’s
January 18th (or thereabouts) – Set sail for Carthagena (but stayed less than 24 hours); continued to Porto-Bello
January 31st – Arrived at Porto-Bello

Porto-Bello: January 31st – July 1st

July 1st – Left Porto-Bello
September 9th, 1731 – Arrived at Dartmouth

The St. Philip Snow

We know less about the St. Philip Snow. Here is its itinerary, thus far:

November 25, 1730 – Set sail from Portsmouth (Spithead)
Early 1731: Arrived in Jamaica
Feb 27th, 1731: Set sail for Porto Bello (with slaves aboard)

We still don’t know which ship Cullen was attached to, or anything else about the St. Philip Snow. So, back to the newspapers we go.

The London Evening Post for August 23-25, 1733 tells us that

Yesterday the South Sea company receiv’d Advice of the safe Arrival of the St. Philip Snow, at Portsmouth, in six Weeks from St. Jago de Cuba, Capt. Stephens, late Capt. Cleland.

This is key: it appears that Capt. Cleland of the St. Philip Snow died in 1733, while away from Great Britain. I could not find any reference in the London newspapers—which were usually quite detailed on the coming and goings of ships—of the St. Philip Snow returning before the date mentioned above. It’s possible it did and just went unnoticed. But even if that were the case, the death of Capt. Cleland in 1733 puts it beyond doubt that this is not the Capt. Cleland we are looking for. This is because Cullen went to stay, for two years, with Capt. Cleland in the parish of Shotts after returning from his voyage. Thomson (Life, v1, 6-7) tells us:

After returning from the West Indies, Dr Cullen remained for some time in London, and during his stay there attended the shop of Mr Murray, apothecary in Henrietta Street…Dr Cullen returned to Scotland in the end of the year 1731, or in the beginning of 1732…In these circumstances, he was invited by his friend Captain Cleland to reside with him at his family estate of Auchinlee, in the parish of Shotts, and to take [p.7] charge of the health of his son, who was affected with a lingering disorder. This situation was peculiarly convenient for Dr Cullen in commencing the practice of his profession. It was near to Hamilton, the place of his birth, and in the vicinity of the residences of many of the most considerable families in the county of Lanark. It was in the neighbourhood also of his patrimonial property, the lands of Saughs, and of another small farm which belonged to his family in the parish of Shotts. Whilst residing there, he seems to have combined with his medical practice the most unremitting application to his studies. Captain Cleland was often heard to say, that nothing could exceed his assiduity at this period; for when not engaged in visiting patients, or in preparing medicines for them, his time was wholly occupied with his books.

After having practiced medicine for nearly two years in the situation described, Dr Cullen, on succeeding to a small legacy by the death of a relation, resolved to devote his attention exclusively to his studies for a certain period, preparatively to fixing himself as a medical practitioner in the town of Hamilton.

So, the Capt. Cleland of the ship Cullen worked on was still alive in 1733, if Thomson’s dates are roughly accurate. Cullen appears to have stayed with Cleland at his family estate of Auchinlee for two years, perhaps from early 1732 to 1734, or thereabouts.

We can, therefore, with some confidence eliminate the St. Philip Snow as the ship on which Cullen practiced as a surgeon. But can we conclude that Cullen was a surgeon on Capt. Cleland’s ship, the Prince William?

I’m inclined to think so, but I would be more confident if we could obtain a crucial piece of information: is there evidence that confirms that the Capt. Cleland of the Prince William is also the Capt. Cleland of Auchinlee, who resided there in the early 1730s? If we could connect those pieces of information, we would be in a strong position to conclude that the Prince William was Cullen’s ship.

I will attempt to do this in Part 3.