William Cullen: his calibre as a teacher, and an unpublished introduction to his A Treatise of the Materia Medica, London, 1773.

WHILE THE main purpose of this paper is to make readily available Cullen's introduction to his first (1761) Edinburgh materia medica course, some characteristics of Cullen's teaching, which was possibly the most significant in eighteenth-century British medical education, will also be considered. Cullen's 1761 materia medica course-omitting the introduction-was published in the early 1770s, initially without Cullen's sanction, as Lectures on the Materia Medica.1 That Cullen's greatly enlarged and monumental Treatise of the Materia Medica (Edinburgh, 1789) was an entirely rewritten version of the Lectures is perhaps the best testimony to his feelings of the inadequacy of the pirated version. Unfortunately, however, the rewritten 1789 Treatise had little of the spontaneity of the Lectures, which, in turn, lacked some of the sparkle characteristic of many manuscripts of students' notes. The main value of the unpublished introduction (see pp. 84-87) is that it sets out in detail Cullen's plan and aims for his course. In contrast, the printed Lectures merely list the four headings under which Cullen considered each drug, with a comment that knowledge of the subject is of two kinds (the study of the natural history and of the crude, dried drug) and brief critical remarks on theories for discovering the therapeutic properties of drugs (e.g., the doctrine of signatures). All these points are amplified and made clear in the unpublished introduction. For instance, one learns of Cullen's attitudes to Linnaeus' classification and how far he intended to use it. Cullen emphasized, too, the difficulties of establishing a generally accepted scheme of classification and drew attention to writings 'best calculated for assisting the student, tho' each follow a different method'. Apart from Linnaeus' botanical scheme he referred to Lewis's alphabetical arrangement,2 Geoffroy's grouping into mineral, vegetable, and animal,3 Cartheuser's classification based on sensory characteristics,4 and Chomel's pharmacological classification.5 Additionally, the introduction includes strong and trenchant criticisms of the views and opinions of various authors on the therapeutic properties of medicines, as well as Cullen's own thoughts on the value of chemistry. But the unpublished introduction does more than give a clear understanding of 1 Much information on the furore over the publication can be found in J. Thomson, An Account ofthe Life, Lectures, and Writings of William Cullen, M.D., Edinburgh, 1859, especially vol. 1, pp. 144 and 611-18. Although it is possible that the lectures were first published in 1771 (cf. Thomson, ibid., p. 526), the earliest versions that have been located are dated 1772. Some of these include Cullen's long list of addenda, and an explanatory preface, as do all the 1773 versions which also have a different title-page. The latter bear the statement 'printed from a correct copy, which has been compared with others by the editors'. An additional preface also suggests that the first 'sheet' of the lectures was reprinted, but no 1772 copies have been found to bear this out. 2This was in the New Dispensatory, London, 1753, which was in fact published anonymously. The 1781 edition revealed the name of Lewis on the title-page for the first time. F. W. Gibbs, 'William Lewis, M.B., F.R.S.', Ann. Sci., 1952, 8, 122-51 (p. 128), notes that the Dispensatory was widely recommended by Cullen (and also by Black, Cullen's successor, in 1766, to the chair of chemistry). 8Geoffroy's Tractatus de Materia Medica, was first published in Paris in 1741. 'Fundamenta Materiae Medicae, first appeared from Frankfort-on-Oder in 1749-50. 6 E.g., Catalogus plantarum officinalium, Paris, 1730.