Sir James Crichton-Browne MD FRS (29th November 1840 – 31st January 1938) was a leading British psychiatrist famous for studies on the relationship of mental illness to brain injury - and for the development of public health policies in relation to mental health. Crichton-Browne's father - William A.F. Browne - joined the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1824 and was later appointed the first Superintendent (1838-1857) of The Crichton Royal Institution in Dumfries. Crichton-Browne was a celebrated author and orator, editor of the highly influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (six volumes, 1871 to 1876), one of Charles Darwin's most significant correspondents and collaborators - on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) - and - like Duchenne de Boulogne and Hugh Welch Diamond - a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography. Crichton-Browne was based in Wakefield from 1866 to 1875, and there he set up a unique asylum laboratory, establishing instruction in psychiatry for students from the nearby Leeds School of Medicine. In 1895, he delivered his celebrated Cavendish Lecture On Dreamy Mental States which attracted the disapproval of the American psychologist William James and - in 1907 - he summarised the implications of his neuropsychiatric research in his Royal Institution Lecture Dexterity and the Bend Sinister. In 1908, he joined the Board of Directors of the Bovril Company. In 1920, after forty-five years as Lord Chancellor's Medical Visitor, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Medico-Psychological Association in the course of which he outlined his memories of Henry Maudsley. From about 1910, Crichton-Browne became publicly identified with social darwinism and the eugenics movement, and this damaged his reputation towards the end of his life; but, in his last ten years or so, he also published seven volumes of memoirs and established himself as the outstanding memoirist of British psychiatry. Throughout his career, Crichton-Browne warned of the dangers of subjecting children to emotional stress during their education; emphasised the asymmetrical character of the human brain and behaviour; and also - like Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer - made some remarkable predictions about the neurological changes associated with severe mental illness, including psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia.
"When considering the relative weights of the two hemispheres of the brain, it occurred to me that their ordinary relations....might possibly be reversed by disease of long standing. It seemed not improbable that the cortical centres which are last organized, which are the most highly evolved and voluntary, and which are supposed to be localised in the left side of the brain, might suffer first in insanity, which consists essentially in reduction from a higher voluntary to a lower automatic sphere." James Crichton-Browne (1879) On The Weight of the Brain.
"We are not yet free from the dangers of disuse or lopsided use of the brain. In moments of optimism we may flatter ourselves with the thought that we are under some sort of evolutionary compulsion....but the truth is that we are as apt to dissolve as to evolve, to sink as to swim....Our fate is in our own hands. We should bear in mind that it is not through ease and indolence, but through toil and conflict that man's highest welfare is attained. It is in the sweat of his brow and the stress of his brain that he has come to be what he is. The story of the brain is an epitome of history...." James Crichton-Browne The Second Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture: The Story of the Brain delivered in Edinburgh on Friday, 29th February 1924.
Read more about James Crichton-Browne: Family Background and Education, Darwin, Ferrier and The Wakefield Reports 1866 - 1875, Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy 1875 - 1922, Elder Statesman of British Psychiatry 1920 - 1938, Crichton-Browne's Legacy