Cullen, William 1710-90
Scottish chemist and physician

Born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, he obtained a post as ship's surgeon on a vessel bound for the West Indies, then returned to practise medicine in Hamilton, attending medical classes in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1747 he began teaching chemistry in Glasgow with great success, being appointed to the chair in medicine in 1755. He also taught chemistry, materia medica and medicine in Edinburgh, and was the leading light of the Edinburgh Medical School during its golden age. He had hundreds of grateful and professionally successful pupils. He expounded his clinical ideas primarily through the nosologically arranged First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1778-79), which was frequently reprinted and translated during the next half-century. He emphasized the importance of the nervous system in the causation of disease, coining the word 'neurosis' to describe a group of nervous diseases, and bitterly opposed the Brunonian system (see John Brown, c.1735-1788).