Health and virtue: or, how to keep out of harm's way. Lectures on pathology and therapeutics by William Cullen c. 1770.

William Cullen MD (1710-90) has not generally been considered amongst the front rank of medical scholars.' His position as a professor in the Edinburgh Medical School, holding consecutively the chairs ofchemistry (1755-66), the theory ofmedicine (1766-73), and the practice of medicine (1773-89), and at the same time (1755-76) contributing to the clinical classes given by himself and his colleagues in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, has ensured him a place in medical annals.2 Estimation of Cullen's particular contribution to medical science has, however, been qualified.3 His biographer, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, began an exercise in rehabilitation which, by focusing on the originality of Cullen's research, set the tone of most subsequent assessment. He has been seen, for example, as one of the "systematizers" ofthe eighteenth century, along with such men as Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), and Albrecht von Haller (1707-77), each ofwhom created a theory ofhuman physiological organization from one fundamental concept.4 But Cullen's physiological base in neural function is considered derivative, a