<i>HUMAN NATURE AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE UNDERSTANDING IN WILLIAM CULLEN’S HISTORY OF MEDICINE</i>

Abstract

This paper explores the parallelism between David Hume’s ideas about history and the lectures on the history of medicine delivered by William Cullen from the 1770s. While history was a popular and widely read genre in eighteenth-century Britain, history of medicine was mostly neglected or considered no more than mere erudition. On the contrary, Cullen thought of history as an essential part of the medical curriculum: he aimed to provide students with a chance to test their intellectual faculties, to analyse medical issues in a historical perspective, and to practise a sound method for medical investigations. In doing so, he interpreted history as an occasion for «improving the understanding», as suggested by Hume’s famous essay Of the Study of History (1741).