I've launched williamcullen.org - a web application that will eventually host all of William Cullen's published works.
What's There Now
One work: Cullen's 1756 essay "Of the Cold Produced by Evaporating Fluids, and of Some Other Means of Producing Cold," published in Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary.
This was Cullen's only published work specifically on chemistry. It describes his experiments on evaporative cooling. It is likely the very first printed discussion (at least in English) of the principles behind artificial refrigeration.
The essay will be:
- Fully searchable
- Readable in a clean interface
- Downloadable as text
- Properly citable with stable URL
Why Start With One Work?
Testing the workflow. I need to refine the digitization process (scanning → OCR → correction → formatting) before scaling up to larger works.
Making progress visible. Better to have something small and real than nothing large and hypothetical.
What's Coming
The major works are being digitized now:
- First Lines of the Practice of Physic (4 volumes, 1777-1784)
- Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (1769)
- A Treatise of the Materia Medica (2 volumes, 1789)
- Institutions of Medicine (1772)
Estimated timeline:
- Major textbooks: 2026
- Translations and later editions: 2026-2027
- Comprehensive coverage: 2027+
This is ~8,000 pages of text total.
Technical Details
The site is built with Sveltekit and hosted on Vercel. The search function works client-side for now (fine for individual works), but I'll add proper full-text search across all works once there are enough to make it worthwhile.
Each work will be:
- Searchable individually and across the corpus
- Downloadable in multiple formats
- Properly cited with stable URLs
- Accompanied by bibliographic metadata
More Work to Do
You can read Cullen's chemistry essay right now at williamcullen.org. More coming soon.