An analytical companion to the Cullen Project
Voice and vocabulary in more than five thousand eighteenth-century consultation letters.
Dr. William Cullen's private medical correspondence, digitized by the University of Glasgow, is one of the largest surviving archives of its kind in English. This site is a companion tool for exploring patterns of voice, vocabulary, and clinical concept across the corpus — the kinds of patterns that only become visible at scale.
Featured analyses
Four prepared lines of inquiry, each a starting point rather than a finding. Use them, then branch into the builder to ask your own questions.
Corpus linguistics
How patients wrote to their doctor
Keyness comparison of patient-authored letters against Cullen's own. First-person pronouns, bodily language, and the register gap between lay and professional prose.
History of clinical writing
The clinical register before the hospital
Attending physicians writing to Cullen already use a depersonalized clinical register. If the registers align, clinical voice was inter-practitioner before it was institutional.
Disability history
Narrating disability before the hospital
The disability subcorpus, stratified by voice. How is impairment described differently by patients, families, and physicians?
Explore
Search the corpus
Full-text concordance search across 5,600 letters. See every occurrence of any term in its surrounding context, filtered by voice, date, or disability relevance.