William Cullen dot net

I’ve decided to make the plunge and have just created a site devoted to everything Cullen: williamcullen.net

You can find it here.

As I explain in the first post, the purpose of the site is to be

an online space where, in addition to discussing Cullen’s life and thought – the subject of my PhD thesis – I could provide links and additional information that might be helpful to other folks interested in William Cullen, the Scottish Enlightenment, or eighteenth-century medicine more generally.

The Cullen Digitisation Project: Material & Numbers

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am ‘digitising’ the William Cullen (1710-1790) Papers, held at Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library (GUL). This includes correspondence, lectures, drafts, and unpublished essays by William Cullen, and a lot of material used by John Thomson (1765-1846) in the early- to mid-nineteenth century to write his biography of Cullen. To be more precise, here is the description of the overall Cullen collection from the GUL catalogue:

Papers of William Cullen (1710-1790), lecturer in Chemistry and Professor of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, including drafts of lectures, medical notes, and letters sent and received by him, used by John Thomson, MD, (1765-1846), in preparation of his ‘An account of the life, lectures, and writings of William Cullen, MD’ (first published 1832). The collection includes some of Thomson’s own papers gathered during his preparation of this book.

The collection has recently been professionally catalogued and placed online, thanks to a generous grant from the Wellcome Trust (in 2009/2010, I believe). As a result of this, it has been further divided and organised as follows:

MS Cullen/A: Correspondence of William Cullen
MS Cullen/B: Lectures and teaching material of William Cullen
MS Cullen/C: Papers and Publications of William Cullen
MS Cullen/D: Drafts and research for ‘Life of Cullen’
MS Cullen/E: Handlists for MS Cullen [*now obsolete, for most purposes]
MS Cullen/F: Illustrations
MS Cullen/G: David Craigie Correspondence regarding ‘Life of Cullen’

How much material is this? It’s hard to be sure, but if you do a search in the GUL Special Collections online catalogue for all the documents that contain the call number MS Cullen, 1489 distinct archival items are listed (but, we can exclude all 6 items contained in MS Cullen/E, which are obsolete, bringing us to 1483). Yet there are also other items that have to do with Cullen (and Thomson’s work on him) that are held in Special Collections, and those ought to be included as well. I’ve identified them as follows (with the number of items listed in brackets):

MS Gen 149 [1]
MS Gen 501/1-2 [2]
MS Gen 505/11 [1]
MS Gen 505/33 [1]
MS Gen 510/1-5 [5]
MS Gen 531/18 [1]
MS Gen 531/5 [1]
MS Gen 526/53 [1]
MS Gen 684-694 [10]
MS Gen 800 [1]
MS Ferguson 51 [3]
MS Hunter H299 [1]
MS Gen 1476/A/Series 6 [7]
MS Gen 1476/C/1 [30]
MS Gen 1476/C/3 [108]

SUBTOTAL: 173 items

GRAND TOTAL: 1656 items

There may be occasion to add a few more items that are relevant to William Cullen as the project goes along, but there is certainly enough material here to keep a grad student busy. The situation is actually more challenging than it at first appears because I have only listed Catalogue items above. While many of these are letters, fragments or short essays, some of them contain full volumes or multiple volumes of material. So the actual page number count (and thus digital image count) is considerably higher. As a conservative estimate, if we imagine that, on average over the whole collection, the mean number of pages per item is 10, the page count is 16,560. That’s a lot of photos. And each photo I take (as a RAW file) is about 18-20MB in size. So I need roughly 325GB of hard drive space for the photos alone, and if one adds the alternate photos I usually take to allow for mistakes and detailed views (and one image for each folder that contains catalogue items), then 400 GB is probably closer to the mark.

When I first dreamt up this project, I estimated that I could photograph about 50 catalogue items a day (roughly 4-5 hours of shooting per day), four days a week. If we round up the number of items to 1700, then the project should take 34 days or 8.5 weeks…which is just about the amount of time I have before heading south to the beautiful city on the Isar. This is the second week I have been working in Glasgow and I am actually managing closer to 75-100 items per day, which will be very helpful, if that kind of progress continues.

(Un)fortunately for scholars interested in Cullen, the Cullen Papers at Special Collections in Glasgow are not even the vast majority of his extant works and correspondence. The library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (of which Cullen was at one time the President) also contains hundreds – actually thousands – of letters and quite a few notes and lecture material as well. Cullen’s consultation letters (back then, physicians would often consult via post), for instance, fill 21 folio volumes and there are an additional 17 volumes of miscellaneous letters that were received by Cullen. For my PhD, I won’t get to all this material. In fact, there is a well-funded digitisation project ongoing that will eventually produce a fully-searchable, indexed digital edition of all 21 volumes of Cullen’s clinical correspondence. But there is certainly much left to do, and I hope to review as much of it as I can, given the limits of time. It’s exciting to think that I am probably the only person in the last 150 years or so who will have handled every single item in the Cullen collection – except for the archivist (and likely the conservator too) who catalogued everything in 2009/10.

MS Cullen Digitisation Project

I recently began a major ‘digitisation’ project that I will chronicle on this blog. I will be taking high-quality digital photographs of hundreds of manuscripts and related material from the 18th century, held at Special Collections at the Glasgow University Library. This mostly consists of the papers, correspondence and lecture material of the eighteenth-century Scottish physician, chemist and professor, William Cullen (1710-1790), who is the major figure of my PhD dissertation (‘thesis’ in the UK). He taught at the Glasgow Medical School (some suggest he is, in fact, justifiably considered one of its founders) and at the Edinburgh Medical School (from 1755-1789) at the height of its renown as the leading centre of medical education in Europe.

Archive Adventures – Imageless for now…

It occurs to me that, before uploading photos I have snapped at the National Archives, I should be clear on what I am/am not allowed to post online. Archives are (justifiably) worried about the abuse of copyright, and I have signed agreements not to publish certain images without their permission. So, until I work that out—until I determine where blogging fits into the publishing scheme as defined by the NAS—I cannot post images from my Archive Adventures! Alas – but hopefully someday soon!

UPDATE: Sadly, it appears not.

From the National Archives of Scotland:

The use of copies for publication (including web-site publication), exhibition or broadcast or any other purpose requires permission from:

I. The current owner of the original document (if not NAS) or

II. the National Archives Image Library (as above). A reproduction fee will be payable.

III. the current owner(s) of the Copyright in the original document. Readers are responsible for identifying the current owner(s) and for obtaining permission required and are liable for the consequences of any copyright infringement.

I suppose I could obtain permission and pay the reproduction fee, for I know that the current owner of the documents I have reviewed at the NAS is the NAS itself (which is apparently not particularly common). Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem worth it to me at this stage.

This has been a short, quick lesson in present-day copyright laws in the UK.

Updates will have to be in words, then! Stay tuned.

Climate and Constitution in Edinburgh

It has been almost 1 year since I posted on this blog. I have a couple posts in gestation and I hope to begin writing more frequently. But then, that was my intention last April as well. I don’t really know what motivates me to write posts when I do, but it is very haphazard….

In any case, my dry spell is about to be broken. Here goes:

I am not one of those lucky souls who never gets sick (though my Dad is one of them). But I wouldn’t say I’m a sickly person either. I tend to be bed-ridden with a virus or infection at most twice a year. But this pattern has been disrupted ever since I moved to Edinburgh. The most recent example: I came down with a simultaneous sore throat, stuffy nose, ear infection and eye infection about two weeks ago. I tried to recover on my own, but it wasn’t happening. I finally went to the Royal Infirmary on a Saturday and got some antibiotics, even though what I was dealing with was mostly viral. But the doctor was slightly concerned that my ear infection was bacterial and – in order to avoid a perforated ear drum – prescribed some antibiotics. Fair enough. I took these for a week and by the next Saturday, I felt better. I figured I wouldn’t have to worry about getting sick again this semester.

How wrong I was! The very next day (Sunday) I was walking to a coffee shop to do some reading, when I felt a chill in my bones. I started shaking. I was wearing enough clothing – or so I thought when I left the flat that morning – but Edinburgh weather is unpredictable. Four seasons in a day, and all that. I didn’t think much of it but the next day my throat was inflamed and I am now essentially reliving the same sickness I had 10 days ago. I went to the GP today, but it’s likely another viral infection, and there’s not much modern medicine can do about it. Bed-rest, healthy food, lots of liquids – that’s about it. I have to let my body fight it out, which probably means the next 3 days in bed. The GP seemed to think that this was a particularly bad winter and she said she saw a lot of opportunistic viral infections going around – my case was no different. But I’m not used to becoming ill consecutively like this, and I don’t like it.

In fact, when it comes to managing viral infections, 21st century medicine offers little therapeutic improvement over its eighteenth century counterpart. Back then, I would have been told similar things about rest and liquids, although I would have probably been bled and given a purgative or two as well. Maybe a dose of mercury as well, if I were (un)lucky. So, at least we know enough now to avoid these harmful treatments – though, again, Hippocrates was counselling his students to, first, do no harm, during classical times.

To continue my travails of illness: I was sick frequently last winter too, even well into the summer. In a journal I keep, I have a note about my “constant colds and sore throats” and heightened hay fever in early June 2010. And I remember feeling run down at various times between February and May as well. I thought, at the time, this was a function of my basement flat, with little light and lots of mold – that somehow the environment I was spending time in was at least partially to blame. I resolved to move out and did so in August, to a much brighter, less mold-infested flat in a greener neighbourhood. And yet, I am dealing with the same health issues here as I was there and am beginning to conclude that my health and the Edinburgh climate simply won’t play nice. My circadian rhythms (a separate chapter in my medical history, to say the least) and immune system simply haven’t been able to accommodate themselves to this very northerly and changeable climate.

To bring in the history of medicine here: there’s actually precedence for this. Eighteenth-century physicians were acutely aware of the effects of climate on one’s constitution, and even back then, the climate of Edinburgh was noted for being particularly harsh and changeable. Sylas Neville, who kept a fairly detailed journal of his time as a student at the Edinburgh Medical School in the late eighteenth century, can be found frequently lamenting the weather and its effects on his health. He writes in a December 1771 entry: “Have a most disagreable cold in my head. Have had more colds since I came here than I had had for 3 or 4 years.” And that is precisely how I feel.

There is much more one could say about the linkage between climate and constitution in eighteenth-century medicine. It was a frequent topic of debate, for instance, at student meetings of the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh.

But that’s a discussion for another post.

Teaching High School

This post is not really about the history of science and medicine but it might be of interest to some people who, upon learning how difficult the academic job market is, decide they want to pursue another, though closely related, career option.

Here’s my story:

After obtaining my M.A. in 2008, I decided to take some time off from graduate school. Ostensibly it would just be for a year, but I had some misgivings about pursuing the PhD and wanted to explore other, related options in an effort to think broadly about my future. My most serious considerations included: a transition into business—management consulting, actually, as peculiar as that seems to me now; joining the Foreign Service; or teaching high school, either in the U.S. or at an international school in Europe. I pursued each of these options fairly extensively, and perhaps I will write about the first two another time. For now, I’d like to talk about the pursuit of a high school teaching job.

Teaching high school has always appealed to me—it still does. I had a truly incredible academic experience in high school, and it left a deep impression on me. After having taught hungover, often uninterested college students (obviously there were pleasant exceptions) as a T.A. in grad school, I began to see how refreshing it might be to work with younger students who, in an ideal world, were eager to learn about the world—and life. Yes, this is the ideal case, very rarely witnessed, but I knew it was possible, given my own experience. And I also felt that one’s impact as a teacher in high school would, on the whole, be far greater than one’s impact as a teacher at the university level. I still believe this. For whatever biological and social reasons, high school students are much more impressionable than college students; that age is a critical developmental stage in our lives. We remember our high school teachers, even the bad ones, in ways that rarely apply to our college professors (obviously, again, there are exceptions to this; I imagine this is particularly unfair to students who attend small liberal arts colleges, but I digress).

In addition to the quasi-transcendental rewards of teaching high school, there were elements about the lifestyle that appealed to me as well. One got ample vacation time, just like a professor, even if a lot of this would be dedicated to grading or course development. There were the long summers. And one would normally work in an academic environment with colleagues who also cared about intellectual pursuits, or at least a dedication to their craft. This is, to be sure, a very rosy picture of the profession, but no less so than I had had of the ‘life of the mind’ as a university professor. And, while comparing future professions, I gave myself some luxury to trade in ideals; after all, I wanted—and still want—to be passionate about what I spend my time doing, and dedication to an ideal is a significant part of this (for me, anyways).

Sure, the pay and prestige of teaching high school would be lower—sometimes significantly—than teaching at a university. And this is not to be minimized. But I felt that, for the most part, there were more similarities between teaching high school and teaching at a university than differences. I could get a lot of the benefits of the academic lifestyle and still find a job. Indeed, having an M.A. (to say nothing of a PhD) would automatically make me a fairly desirable commodity! It was a tremendously refreshing feeling, after the usual disappointments and stresses of graduate school life, to finally be sought after by prospective employers. And, indeed, some of my elder graduate school colleagues, after becoming frustrated with the academic job market, decided to teach high school and seemed quite happy doing so. So I was quite taken with the prospect.

Before becoming serious about options, however, I had to make some logistical decisions. Where did I want to teach? At what kind of school—public or private? Boarding or day? International or parochial? Perhaps understandably, I gravitated toward what my own experience had been like, in my case at a very elite boarding school in the Northeast of the U.S. I was interested in this for a variety of reasons: I knew what I would be getting into and I knew the lifestyle. Yes, teaching at a boarding school can be very demanding, especially as one has even less ‘free’ time than one would have at a day school. It’s a total, immersive experience. But I kind of wanted that. Plus, there were some non-remunerative benefits, often including free housing and meals. In fact, the more I looked at, the more it seemed that, at least as a high school teacher at a boarding school, I could probably make as much as an assistant professor at a research university, if one included the non-salary benefits. This was a somewhat startling realization. Why go through the hell of the academic job market when one could teach high school for somewhat similar pay (at least at first, and obviously there were serious caps on what one could earn as one’s seniority rose)?

Part of me, though, had serious misgivings about teaching at an elite private school, boarding or otherwise. I was keenly aware of my own privileged education and knew plenty of fellow students who did not appreciate, nor seemed to deserve, the incredible education they were getting at a very steep price. Did I want to perpetuate the increasing educational inequality between the haves and have-nots in American society? My liberal instincts were pushing me in the other direction, to teach at a public high school with students from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, where the benefits to society would be much greater. After all, the privileged students at a boarding school would, I presumed, do just fine, whether they had inspiring teachers or not. This could not be assumed for the many students who struggle through the American public school system. The moral and social impact I might have at a public high school would be more significant—for me and for my students—than if I worked at an elite private school.

But there were unforeseen challenges to teaching at a public high school. Although the salary would normally be higher at a public high school, the non-remunerative benefits that came with teaching and living at a boarding school would be missing. Perhaps a public boarding school would have been the ideal fit, but there were few, if any, of those in the U.S. (this is slowly changing, due to the very welcome efforts of non-profits like the SEED foundation). Perhaps more significantly for me at the time, not just anyone could begin teaching as a public school teacher. One needed to be certified to teach in the state in which the school resided. And this usually required taking courses at a school of education for a year or two and then passing some tests. I didn’t have the time or inclination to do that. In fact, I could have had a PhD in history and years of teaching experience as a professor but still be unqualified—so far as the law was concerned—to teach public high school. Yet I could teach at a private school as soon as I found a job. Regardless of the merits (or inanities) of state and federal teaching regulations, the consequence for me was that teaching at a public school was out of the question—at least for now. And it was this, perhaps more than anything else, that ensured that I would not be teaching at a public high school, even if I felt a certain amount of moral obligation to do so.

So I would look for jobs at private high schools (day or boarding) for the time being. But where? I had long wanted to move to Europe and suddenly a new option occurred to me. What about teaching at an international school in, say, the Netherlands or Italy? The education would be in English, even though many of the students might not speak English as their native tongue, so I would be able to teach there. And teaching history to students from a variety of different countries and cultures, while challenging, would also be particularly interesting. How do you, for instance, teach the Cuban Missile Crisis to a group of Russian, German, American and Italian students? Clearly, there can be no appeal to nationalistic history, let alone the assumption that basic cultural facts about the protagonists will be known or understood. So the addition of a mix of cultures and languages in a school environment—something I didn’t have much experience of during my own time in high school—might really add significantly to the teaching experience—in a good way.

So with these considerations in mind, I revised my resume/CV, obtained my references, put together an appealing teaching portfolio (and accompanying webpage to show I was hip with technology) and began the job hunt. I took the job search seriously and put in the effort to show that I did so.

One of the first things I learned was that, while one could potentially cold call a school to find out about job opportunities, many of them preferred applicants to go through one of the big recruiting firms that specialized in educational placement. I signed up to work with Carney, Sandoe & Associates for my U.S. private school search, and with Search Associates and International School Services (ISS) for my international school search. And my search for a high school teaching job had begun!

———–

Perhaps at some later date, I will continue to the conclusion of this story. Suffice it to say that I am now back in a PhD program, very excited about my research and very happy with my decision to return to grad school, albeit in the U.K. instead of the U.S. But I did have two very appealing job offers to teach high school history—one at an elite West Coast boarding school and one at an international school in Switzerland. Although I decided to turn these down for personal reasons, I enjoyed the process and am happy to give advice to those interested in pursuing this appealing career option. Who knows—perhaps, if I get churned out by the academic job search like others before me, I will return to my earlier idea of teaching high school, with PhD in hand. There are many benefits to doing so! Although it turned out not to be the right decision for me at that time, I have learned not to make any claims on the future.

Book Reviews

I have made some efforts recently to contribute to a few academic journals. I am not yet ready to try to publish a full-length journal article, but book reviews are a nice stepping stone to that goal. I have completed a book review for the Annals of Science (forthcoming) and have agreed to write two more reviews, one for the British Journal for the History of Science and one for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The Annals of Science review will be the most substantial at about 1200 words, while the others are meant to be 600-1000 words.

Writing book reviews is great practice in concise writing and helps distill one’s own thoughts on the content of the book. A certain amount of diplomacy is required as well. Although book reviews are not particularly noteworthy aspects of one’s CV, they do show that you’re contributing to the profession and they are a form of publication.

All good reasons for me to continue doing them!

BSHS Annual Conference

On March 6, I heard that my paper proposal for the annual British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) conference was accepted by the Programme Committee. This is good news and means I will be heading up to Aberdeen, where I have yet to visit, in July. For more details about the conference, visit the BSHS website or go directly here. The general announcement for the conference is reproduced below:

The BSHS Annual Conference will take place at the University of Aberdeen from 22 – 25 July 2010. The conference will start late in the afternoon of 22 July with a plenary lecture and reception. The main venue is the Conference Centre at the heart of the sixteenth-century campus of King’s College in Old Aberdeen, with the conference dinner to be held in the impressive Elphinstone Hall.

My paper, which I have yet to write, is entitled “Dissecting the Soul: William Cullen and Medical Theory during the Scottish Enlightenment” and is essentially a case study of William Cullen’s thoughts about (and uses of) the concept of soul in his medical theory. I’m excited to head up to Aberdeen, to present my first formal conference paper, and to meet fellow scholars in the field.

I’ll post details about the programme when they become available.

PhD Presentation Day – Summary

So, PhD Presentation came and went here at the University of Edinburgh.

First, from my own perspective, I thought the content of my talk was solid, and I finished speaking with minutes to spare. If anything, I spoke too quickly. But the MSc students who listened and wrote feedback about my talk at least claimed to be able to follow what I was saying. So that’s good. I was a little annoyed by my own nervousness; although perfectly natural at these sorts of things, I thought it robbed me a bit of my enthusiasm (I tend to lose enthusiasm when I’m nervous; go figure). But, despite that being my own impression, the audience didn’t remark on it, so it must not have been so apparent.

In terms of content, I could have said a bit more about the materials I intend to use in my research. Will I focus on patient reports, medical journals, doctor’s notes – what will I use as evidence? What are my research methods? I didn’t talk much about this, if at all, and some of the feedback I received picked up on this.

A few of the audience members asked questions afterwards. They were particularly interested in discussions about the soul in the contexts of surgery and dissection. Were there prohibitions on dissecting human bodies, given the religious beliefs at the time? Was the soul something that surgeons actually concerned themselves with on a practical level?

Overall, I think the presentation was good but it also shows how much I still have left to do. It’s very much a beginning.

PhD Presentation Day

On Tuesday, February 1st, I’ll be giving a 15 minute presentation of my work-in-progress to fellow Edinburgh 1st-year PhDs. The talk is tentatively entitled: “Dissecting the Soul: Medical Theory and Religious Debate during the Scottish Enlightenment”. I’m using it as a chance to present my current thinking about—and motivation for—my thesis topic to a non-specialist audience.

I hope to explain why a focus on the soul is rich with possibilities, especially in a medical context. I will provide a sense of the different implications it has for various fields of inquiry in the eighteenth century. I will then take a particular example in the medical context and show how it relates to a broader religious framework, thereby also showing how labelling the Enlightenment as an age of increasing secularisation and ‘rationality’ is misleading. Or at least, that’s the plan.