ABSTRACT | PDF
This issue is dedicated to William Cullen on his birth tercentenary.
William Cullen (15 April 1710 – 5 February 1790) was a Scottish physician and chemist.
The term neurosis was coined by Cullen in 1769 to refer to “disorders of sense and motion” caused by a “general affection of the nervous system.” For him, it described various nervous disorders and symptoms that could not be explained physiologically. It derives from the Greek word neuron (nerve) with the suffix –osis (diseased or abnormal condition).
Publications
His chief works were First Lines of the Practice of Physic; Institutions of Medicine (1710) andSynopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (1785), which contained his classification of diseases into four great classes:
• Pyrexiae, or febrile diseases, as typhus fever
• Neuroses, or nervous diseases, as epilepsy
• Cachexiae, or diseases resulting from bad habit of body, as scurvy
• Locales, or local diseases, as cancer.
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