Cullen continued to deliver his lectures until 1789, having resigned his professorship on the 30th December, and he died on the 5th February 1790, almost eighty years of age. He was buried at Kirknewton, in which parish was situated his estate of Ormiston Hill. This latter, which he had beautified with very great care, had to be sold after his death for the benefit of his family.
Dr. Anderson describes Dr. Cullen as having a striking and not unpleasing aspect, although by no means elegant. His eye was remarkably vivacious and expressive. In person he was tall and thin, stooping very much in later life. In walking he had a contemplative look, scarcely regarding the objects around him. When in Edinburgh he rose before seven, and would often dictate to an amanuensis till nine. At ten he commenced his visits to patients, proceeding in a sedan chair through the narrow closes and wynds. He always lived, while in Edinburgh, in a comparatively small house in the Mint, not far from the seat of his academical duties. For them he may be said to have lived and died.
The family of the Gregorys has been perhaps equally celebrated with the Monros in connection with university life in Scotland, and has certainly furnished it with a larger number of eminent professors. James Gregory, the celebrated inventor of the reflecting telescope, was the first great man of the family, and his publication of a work on optics in 1663 marked an era in that science. His early death in 1675, at the age of 37, deprived science of many brilliant discoveries in prospect. His only son, James, became Professor of Medicine in King’s College, Aberdeen, and died in 1731.
His younger son, John Gregory, the first of the medical Gregorys who became associated with the fame of Edinburgh, was only seven years old when his father died in 1731. After being educated at Aberdeen, under the care of his elder brother, who had succeeded his father, and also under the influence of his cousin, Thomas Reid, the well-known metaphysician, young Gregory entered at Edinburgh in 1741, and studied under the elder Monro, Sinclair, and Rutherford; and at the Medical Society commenced a warm friendship with Mark Akenside, author of the “Pleasures of Imagination.” In 1745-6 he studied at Leyden under Albinus, and having received the M.D. degree from Aberdeen during his absence, he was elected to the chair of philosophy there on his return, and lectured there for three years on mathematics, and moral and natural philosophy. In 1749 he resigned this chair in order to devote himself to medicine, and in 1752 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Forbes, who had beauty, intellect, and wit, and brought him a fortune.
Finding that Aberdeen afforded him no sufficient field for practice in competition with his elder brother, Gregory went in 1754 to London, where he had already friends such as Wilkes and Charles Townshend, whom he had met at Leyden, and where he speedily made other friends, of whom may be mentioned George, Lord Lyttelton, Edward and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was at once elected into the Royal Society, and would no doubt have gained fashionable support; but his elder brother dying in 1755, he was recalled to Aberdeen to fill the Professorship of Medicine. Here he continued to practise and to lecture till 1764, publishing in the latter year “A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World.” He then removed to Edinburgh with a view to securing a professorship there. This fell to his lot in 1766, on the death of Rutherford. In the same year he succeeded Dr. Andrew Whytt as physician to the king in Scotland. He at first lectured on the Practice of Physic solely, but in 1770 he agreed with Cullen that they should lecture in alternate years on the Theory and the Practice, and this arrangement was continued permanently. As a lecturer he was very successful, simple and not in any way oratorical in style. He was especially noted for some lectures on the “Duties and Qualifications of a Physician,” which were afterwards published, and went through several editions. He gave the profits to a poor and deserving student. In 1772 he published “Elements of the Practice of Physic,” a kind of syllabus of lectures; and this completes the list of his medical works. His name was more known after his death as the author of a little book of advice to young girls, “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters,” which has gone through very many editions. His tone may be judged from the following extract:—
“Do not marry a fool; he is the most untractable of all animals; he is led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice of reason.... But the worst circumstance that attends a fool is his constant jealousy of his wife being thought to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him; and he is continually doing absurd and disagreeable things, for no other reason but to show he dares do them.... A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has known only the most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst diseases on his wife and children if he has the misfortune to have any.”
Gregory’s predominant qualities were good sense and benevolence. In conversation he had a warmth of tone and of gesture that were very pleasing, united to gentleness and simplicity of manner. To his pupils he was a friend, ever easy of access, and ready to assist them to the utmost. His Edinburgh life was spent in intimate association with David Hume, Lord Monboddo, Lord Kaimes, Dr. Blair, and the elder Tytler. James Beattie loved him with enthusiastic affection, as the closing stanzas of “The Minstrel” testify. Gregory died suddenly on the 9th February 1773, from gout, from which he had frequently suffered. He had thus scarcely attained the age of fifty.
James Gregory, who succeeded his father in the professorship, was born in Aberdeen in 1753. He was educated in Edinburgh, and also studied for a short time at Christ Church, Oxford, where his relation, Dr. David Gregory, had been dean. He acquired a strong taste for classics and no little classical erudition, so that he was throughout life fond of making apposite Latin quotations, and wrote that language easily and accurately. He was still a student of medicine at Edinburgh when his father’s sudden death took place in 1773. The son by a great effort completed his father’s course of lectures, and showed so much ability that the professorship was practically kept open for him. In 1774 he took the M.D. degree, and spent the next two years in studying medicine on the Continent. In 1776, being then only twenty-three, he was appointed Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, and in the following year also commenced to give clinical lectures at the infirmary, which method of instruction he continued for more than twenty years. His practice at first was not extensive, until his pupils had themselves become practitioners, and called him in as a consultant. In his later years, after Cullen’s death, his practice increased largely, and in the ten years preceding his death he had the leading consulting practice in Scotland.
In 1780-2 Gregory published his “Conspectus Medicinæ Theoreticæ,” written in excellent Latin; it speedily became widely known, and was extensively read not only in Britain but also on the Continent. It has gone through numerous editions. Its more important and valuable portions were those dealing with therapeutics. In 1790 he was appointed Cullen’s successor in the chair of the Practice of Medicine, and from that time continued to lecture to large classes down to his death in 1821 (April 2). Thus he held an almost autocratic position for the long period of over thirty years; and it is much to be regretted that his great talents in repartee, quick memory for telling quotations, and fondness for a joke, led him to take an active part in the medical controversies which have embittered so many careers in Edinburgh. The long list of controversial books and pamphlets by Dr. Gregory, given by Mr. John Bell in his “Letters on Professional Controversy and Manners,” 1810, could be considerably extended, and it affords a melancholy picture of misplaced energy. One of these extended to 700 pages quarto, and its tone may be judged from the following extracts from the “Memorial to the Managers of the Royal Infirmary.”