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.

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.

General information about the Conference can be found here. And the conference programme is here. I delivered a paper entitled, ‘”In a special manner this deserves the attention of Physicians”: William Cullen and the Art of Preserving Health’. It was adapted from a forthcoming PhD chapter that I am now eager to return to.

I was genuinely impressed with every talk given and the discussions held after each panel. The Cullen Project itself, which is aiming for completion in March 2014, will undoubtedly be a great boon to Cullen scholarship and those interested in the practices of medicine in the eighteenth century, among much else. It’s going to be a very powerful tool for future use.

I hope the participants will continue to be in touch with each other, as work on Cullen continues in the years ahead. There appears to be a renewed interest in all things Cullen, on account of the Cullen Project, among other reasons, and this is all for the better.

It certainly encourages me to work harder and to focus on completing my own research on Cullen so that I can share it with 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.

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.

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.

Of course, as is usual with Cullen, there is too much ground to cover on this topic in a single chapter; I’ve learned that the hard way on more than one occasion. So what, in particular, is worthy of investigation?

I want to first point out, which oddly has not quite been done, why Cullen thought the nervous system was so fundamental to understanding the animal economy, both in health (physiology) and disease (pathology).

Next, I will provide a general overview of Cullen’s model of the nervous system: its components, functions and processes. The latter includes, of particular importance, that of sensation.

With this in hand, I will move on to consider, in some detail, two topics that have been debated in the historiography: (i) Cullen’s views of the relationship between the mind (and/or the soul) and the body, from a medical point of view and (ii) Cullen’s understanding of the nervous fluid/aether or power, and its role in the nervous system in general, and in the energy of the brain in particular. Cullen has a fascinating discussion of the brain’s states of Excitement and Collapse that tie these things together, and I want to go into some detail exploring this.

That’s the plan, anyways, at this early stage in the chapter-drafting process.

I have a few other posts on the back burner, in various stages of completion. And I do hope to update this site more often than I have. A New Year’s Resolution, perhaps?

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.

There is lots on the back burner. I am almost done with my chapter on Cullen’s approach to hygiene, and I’ll move on to his nosology next. I’d like to make sense of why Cullen attached so much importance to the nosological project, or rather, why he attached so much significance to classification and logical criticism.

More to come from the Washington, DC area…