Thomas Stephen Cullen

Background

Thomas Stephen Cullen was born on November 20, 1868 at Bridgewater, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of Thomas Cullen, a Methodist minister, and Mary Greene Cullen.

Education

After schooling at the Toronto Collegiate Institute he entered the medical school of the University of Toronto, where he was graduated near the head of his class in 1890.

Career

During his internship in Toronto General Hospital, on the occasion of a visit from Howard A. Kelly, professor of gynecology at Johns Hopkins University, Cullen was assigned to assist Kelly in an operation. Impressed by Kelly's extraordinary skill, Cullen asked him for appointment to a residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and went to Baltimore to work toward it. While waiting for a place on the house staff, he volunteered to work in the pathology laboratory, where he learned much from William H. Welch and William T. Councilman. After his internship with Kelly during 1892, Cullen returned to Welch's laboratory, where he had charge of gynecological pathology for three years.

In April 1893 he went to Europe and spent six months in the laboratory of Johannes Orth at Göttingen. After his return, at his boardinghouse in Baltimore, Cullen formed a close friendship with Max Broedel, the brilliant medical artist whom Kelly had brought from Germany to illustrate his books; the acquaintance was later of great advantage to both men.

In the fall of 1896 the gynecological residency at Johns Hopkins at last became vacant, and Cullen became Kelly's chief assistant in the operating room and the wards of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He began work on his first book, an ambitious treatise on cancer of the uterus, for which Kelly lent him $6, 000 for illustrations and other expenses.

After his residency Cullen was appointed associate in gynecology (a university rank equivalent to assistant professor) and ended private practice in Baltimore while continuing his part-time teaching, surgical work, and writing at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

He maintained this connection throughout his life, in spite of several calls to chairs of gynecology or pathology in other universities. Johns Hopkins made him an associate professor and ultimately a full professor in 1919. He taught every class of Johns Hopkins medical students from the opening of the school until his retirement in 1939. In 1910, when his friend Broedel was invited to a post elsewhere, Cullen by vigorous effort secured an endowment from Henry Walters of Baltimore for a department of art as applied to medicine, of which Broedel was made head. Cullen also became attached to an older institution, the Church Home and Infirmary, where he became gynecologist-in-chief and extended his practice to abdominal surgery, doing some pioneer work in surgery of the liver. For years he expended much effort and his personal funds in building up a first-class surgical clinic at that venerable institution. Cullen's considerable talent for the promotion of good causes was exercised in a variety of ways. He was in the vanguard of the effort by American physicians, early in the twentieth century, to educate the public about cancer. Not without opposition within the medical profession, he persuaded the editors of the Ladies' Home Journal to publish an article by Samuel Hopkins Adams that broke through the public ignorance of the subject. With political savoir-faire Cullen intervened with party boss John "Sonny" Mahon to keep a good Baltimore health officer in office, and he became for some years a behind-the-scenes adviser to party leaders in an effort to keep politics out of the health office.

As a member of the Maryland State Board of Health he took an active part in political action for protecting the Chesapeake oyster beds from pollution. As a trustee and, later, president of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, he led in procuring a modern building for its central branch. A lifelong user of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (now the National Medical Library), he campaigned before Congress in a losing fight to keep the great library in downtown Washington.

He held various offices, including the presidency, of the Baltimore City Medical Society and the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland (the state medical society). Quite early in his career Cullen interested himself in the affairs of the American Medical Association and later was a member of its board of trustees. In 1914, and for some years thereafter, when the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was working out the radical plan of putting the heads of the clinical departments on a full-time basis like the professors of preclinical sciences, Cullen found himself at odds with the administration of the school. He wished to retain his private practice and he was also dissatisfied with the plan to bring the departments of obstetrics and gynecology together in a new women's clinic building, in which he thought his department would be inadequately housed. The controversy was long and sharp, but Cullen's record of service and his professional prestige won a compromise that left him much of his independence until his retirement in 1939, after which the two departments were united under a full-time professor.

Cullen spent his last years mostly at a home his second wife owned on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He died in Baltimore.

Achievements

• Cullen established Johns Hopkins’ gynecologic pathology laboratory. Cullen was the first in America to examine tissues removed in the operating room, using the microscope to make diagnoses. He thus pioneered what was to become the field of gynecologic pathology in the United States.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Cancer of the Uterus: Its Pathology, Symptomatology, Diagnosis, and Treatment; Also the Pathology of Diseases of the Endometrium (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Cancer of the Uterus: Its Pathology, Symptom...)

  • Tuberculosis of the Endometrium (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Tuberculosis of the Endometrium In four Of ...)

  • An Extra-Abdominal Multilocular Ovarian Cyst (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from An Extra-Abdominal Multilocular Ovarian Cyst...)

  • Adeno-Myome des Uterus (Classic Reprint) (German Edition)

    (Excerpt from Adeno-Myome des Uterus Drusige Elemente sin...)

  • Adenomyoma of the Uterus

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Embryology, Anatomy, and Diseases of the Umbilicus Together With Diseases of the Urachus

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Hydrosalpinx, Its Surgical and Pathological Aspects: With a Report of Twenty-Seven Cases (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Hydrosalpinx, Its Surgical and Pathological ...)

  • A Series of Intestinal Anastomoses (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Series of Intestinal Anastomoses Gyn. No....)

Membership

He was a member of Maryland State Board of Health.

Connections

In 1901, Cullen married Emma Jones Beckwith of Louisville, Kentucky , who had been head nurse in Howard Kelly's operating room. She died in 1918. In 1920 he married Mary Bartlett Dixon of Baltimore. There were no children from either marriage.

Father:

Thomas Cullen

clergyman

Mother:

Mary Greene Cullen

Spouse:

Mary Bartlett Dixon

Spouse:

Emma Jones Beckwith

Friend:

Max Broedel