so, by the pupils who listened to his instructions, Cullen was regarded as the paragon of scientific medical intellectuality. He had succeeded Dr. Plummer in the Chair of Chemistry in 1756, and Dr. Whytt in that of Institutes in 1766, which position he was holding at the time the American students, who were the founders of our School, were in attendance upon his lectures.
The warmth of commendation on the part of Dr. Rush may be taken as an explicit illustration of the popularity of Dr. Cullen with his pupils. “Dr. Cullen (says he, in writing to Dr. Morgan) continues still to be the idol of his pupils; he has lately proposed a Theory concerning the offices of the Brain and Nerves that will do him more honour, however, than anything he has ever yet found out. I have not room to do it justice in this place; hereafter you shall be welcome to it. His Clinical lectures and his practice in the Infirmary cannot be too highly praised; in each of them he shows the most extensive reading and the most consummate skill. He intends to publish a ‘Nosologica Methodica’ next summer, which will contain a complete arrangement of all diseases under proper classes, orders, genera, and species, somewhat in the manner of Sauvages, tho’ considerably different from his in the matter of arrangement.”
When Cullen first began to lecture in the Infirmary of Edinburgh upon practical medicine, he deviated from the routine of following Boerhaave implicitly. To this, exception was strongly taken. He tells the story of the difficulties he experienced in thus deviating from so renowned a master, in his Introductory to the Session of 1783-4: “About twenty years after I had left this University as a student, I was again called to it to take a Professor’s Chair, when I still found the system of Boerhaave prevailing as much as ever, and even without any notice taken of what Boerhaave himself and his commentator, Van Swieten, had in the meantime added. Soon after I came here I was engaged to give Clinical, that is to say, practical lectures, and in these I ventured to give my own opinion of the nature and cure of diseases different in several respects from that of the Boerhaavians. This soon produced an outcry against me. In a public College, as I happened to
