An analytical companion to the Cullen Project
Voice and vocabulary in more than five thousand eighteenth-century consultation letters.
Dr. William Cullen's (c.1712-1790) clinical correspondence, digitised by an AHRC-funded project at Glasgow University (2012-2015), 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 concepts across the corpus.
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.
Curated analyses
See what the corpus reveals
Pre-built analyses on voice and register, patient cases, diseases, geography, and Cullen's consulting network. Each links into the live tools so you can extend or challenge it.
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 or date.