The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

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This project will create a publicly accessible, searchable on-line electronic edition of one of the most important archives of historic medical correspondence in Britain. The chemist and physician William Cullen (1710-1790) was one of the most influential medical scholars, practitioners and authors of the European Enlightenment. Born in Lanarkshire and educated in the arts at Glasgow University, Cullen served as a ship's surgeon before becoming a general practitioner and lecturer. He was awarded an M.D. by Glasgow in 1740, and between 1744 and 1755 he lectured there on chemistry, physiology and medical botany. He moved to Edinburgh University in 1755 where he successively held the chairs of chemistry, medicine (theory and practice), and 'materia medica' (pharmacology). Cullen was also a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the author of important medical text-books and an associate of David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black and Benjamin Franklin. Throughout his long and distinguished academic career, Cullen maintained a private practice largely conducted through the medium of consultation letters which he exchanged with an international circle of patients and physicians (often former students). This body of correspondence dating between 1764 and 1790 and consisting of about 5,794 letters, is held by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) to which Cullen once served as president. This archive is of particular value because we often have both sides of the correspondence; Cullen not only kept his incoming letters but in many instances he also kept copies of his replies (dictated to an amanuensis). From 1 April 1781 he made use of a copying machine invented by his famous associate James Watt. This took the form of a press into which an original was placed against a sheet of thin copy paper specially impregnated with ink and a vinegar solution. These copies - mounted at the time on backing paper - are particularly delicate, but the long-term preservation of their contents will be assured by digitisation. Correspondents wrote from throughout Scotland, England and Ireland as well as places abroad, including Antwerp, Rouen, Genoa, Berlin, Cadiz, Madeira, New York and New Orleans. The patients range from leading aristocrats, clergyman, merchants - and female family members - to a plantation slave and 'John Turnbull, an Edinburgh weaver'. James Boswell writes on behalf of the dying Samuel Johnson. Some letters include non-medical matters including personal, professional, scientific, political, philosophical and literary reflections. The importance of this archive has been recognised by specialist medical historians, but while it offers a potentially rich resource for scholars, teachers and the general public the sheer scale and current layout of the archive has been inhibiting. Those scholars who have examined the archive comment on the problem of scale, especially when there is no detailed inventory readily linking the incoming letters with Cullen's responses. A digital edition will not only provide page images, accurate transcriptions and scholarly annotations but also enable the navigation of the text using such search-terms as 'date', 'sender' (gender, professional status, etc), 'place of posting', 'patients' (gender, profession etc), 'symptoms', 'diseases', 'diagnostic terminology', 'literary and philosophical allusions' etc. The database will be made accessible through an informative website with user-guidance. It will be sustained in the long-term by Glasgow University with the technical support of their Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute and as part of a projected Institute of Medical Humanities. Copyright of the Cullen letters rests with the RCPE. Copyright of all introductory, editorial and guidance material rest with Glasgow University.