DR. CULLEN comes of a family which has given one of the most famous names to the annals of the medical profession. It has been connected with the Bothwell district for several centuries, and until 1730 possessed the lands of Sauchs, now merged in the estate of Woodhall. More than a hundred and fifty years ago it produced "the Founder of the Glasgow Medical School," in the person of William Cullen, M.D., the first Professor of Medicine in Glasgow University to teach his subject by systematic lectures, doing for medical knowledge in his day what Goethe did for literature at a later time - absorbing, integrating, and classifying its thought. The influence of his achievements has sent a member of every later generation of his name to the calling of medicine.
    Dr. Cullen is a son of Mr. William Cullen of Bothlyn, Gartcosh, and was born at Kilsyth, Stirlingshire, in 1861. He is one of nine sons, of whom another, John Cullen, M.D., is in practice in Manchester, He studied at Glasgow University, and graduated there in 1884. The following two or three years he spent in acquiring experience as a medical assistant in England and Scotland, and after a trip to India he bought a practice in Glasgow and settled there in 1887. In addition to the work of a busy practice, he holds appointments, among others, of Medical Officer and Honorary Lecturer on Ambulance to the Corporation Tramways (Central Section), of District Medical Officer to Glasgow Parish Council, and of Senior District Surgeon-Accoucheur to Glasgow Maternity Hospital. He is Vice-President of the Scottish Poor-Law Medical Officers' Association, Chairman of the Eighth Ward Committee, an elder in Glasgow Cathedral, and a Director of the Royal Asylum, Gartnavel.
    Since 1885, besides articles of general interest to the Graphic and other periodicals, he has contributed leading and special articles on professional subjects to the Provincial Medical Journal and the Glasgow Medical Journal, and he was the author of a tentative series of four articles on the life of Professor William Cullen which appeared in the columns of the Hamilton Advertiser (his subject was Provost of Hamilton when 29 years of age). Of late he has set on record trenchantly and suggestively a series of "Observations on the City Poor" in the pages of the Poor Law and Local Government Magazine, and is author of the familiar Ambulance Illustrated published by Gowans & Gray.

Back to Index of Glasgow Men (1909)