Medicine and the five senses

attention to Cullen's metaphysics, shared to a great extent with David Hume and Adam Smith, reveals a larger project, the endorsement of learning, enquiry, and progress. Cullen, it might be said, was creating the role of the philosophical doctor as well as that of the philosophical chemist. Gunter Risse is interesting on Cullen as a clinician. Risse shows there were significant differences between Cullen's practice as evidenced by his clinical lectures in the infirmary and his consultation by letter. At first sight this might be expected. Cullen was dealing with quite different clientele: the poor in the hospital and the wealthy writing from their homes. But clinical lectures cannot be taken as a mirror of regular infirmary practice. And, equally important, clinical lectures on the poor could have been devices for teaching aspiring doctors to practise on the rich. W. F. Bynum's paper contains an important insight, which, with hindsight, seems obvious. The meaning of nervous system for Cullen comprehended the now separate muscular system. This insight, Bynum shows, opens a variety of new perspectives on Cullen's work. Noteworthy too is Roger Emerson's reminder that Edinburgh University was in many respects not unique in the eighteenth century. It was locked, like Glasgow, into a dense local and national patronage network. Other papers in the volume deal with Cullen's place in eighteenth-century medicine, general practice in Hamilton, Cullen and dietetics, his nosology, his influence on American medicine, and his place in the founding of the Royal Medical Society.