how worthy of attention is the similarity of their public career. They both occupied successively the same chairs in the respective institutions of which they were conspicuous ornaments and supporters. Cullen commenced his course of teaching in the Professorship of Chemistry, was transferred to that of Institutes, and, finally, to the one of Practice; while Rush, in the term of his long life, occupied successively the chairs pertaining to each of these branches of medical science.
When Cullen became a teacher of medicine, he made an innovation which at the time was considered rash. It was the abandonment of the Latin language and the use of vernacular English. The Latin was considered the language of science, and as such was used upon the Continent, as well as in England and Scotland. He was accused of not being sufficiently familiar with it to use it readily, but from this charge he is vindicated by the fact of having received his education in that tongue, and moreover of having delivered a course of botany in it. When, about the year 1746, he adopted the new plan of delivering his lectures, he conferred a service which was afterwards acknowledged by its imitation. From this period the use of the Latin language was gradually dropped.[1]
The Lectures on the Materia Medica by Dr. Cullen, were first republished in Philadelphia, by Robert Bell, in 1775. To exhibit the estimation in which that distinguished teacher was held everywhere, the following advertisement is singularly pertinent. “The American Physicians who wish to arrive at the top of their profession are informed that the great Professor Cullen’s Lectures on the Materia Medica, containing the very cream of Physic, are now selling by the said Bell, on Third Street. Price Five dollars.” The expectation of a ready sale may be surmised from this extract.[2]
Cullen’s “First Lines of the Practice of Physic” was subsequently published in this country, in 1781. With reference
- ↑ See Thomson’s Life of Cullen, vol. i. p. 28.
- ↑ The work first published was a surreptitious edition of the Lectures on Materia Medica by Dr. Cullen, delivered in 1761. It was issued from the Edinburgh Press in 1771, when an injunction to prohibit its sale was obtained from the Court of Chancery. It was republished in London in 1773. Dr. Cullen published his “Treatise of Materia Medica” in 1789.
