Cullen, William

   (1710–1790)

   The great Enlightenment systematizer of illnesses, especially psychiatric, Cullen was born in Hamilton, Scotland, into the family of an estate official of the Duke of Hamilton. After years of study and itinerant work as a medical practitioner, he graduated with an M.D. from Glasgow University in 1740. He began lecturing at Glasgow in 1744—mostly in chemistry rather than medicine—becoming in 1751 professor of medicine there. In 1755, he came to Edinburgh University as the professor of chemistry, then from 1766 until his death professed the institutes of medicine and the practice of physic. Although he had little experience with psychiatric ailments, in his First Lines of the Practice of Physic, published in Edinburgh in 1777 and in following years, he laid out a new classification of psychiatric and neurological disorders that replaced the old concept of the humors with a modern notion of the "neuroses," based on clinical observation and a theory of pathology. One of the four orders of neuroses were the Vesaniae, or "disorders of the intellectual functions." The Vesaniae were then subdivided into (1) amentia, meaning "imbecility of the judgment"; (2) melancholia, meaning "partial insanity"; (3) mania, meaning "universal insanity"; and oneirodynia, meaning "inflamed or disturbed imagination during sleep." Given that Edinburgh was then the premier academic center in Britain and Cullen its most renowned professor, his classification became highly influential in detaching psychiatric nosology from a millennia-old tradition of humors and steering it toward a nosology based on the principle of cutting nature at the joints.