James Crichton-Browne - Crichton-Browne's Legacy

Crichton-Browne's Legacy

"The Doctor's Case Book is locked in a drawer, but his Note Book is ever ready to receive the jottings of the passing thoughts of his professional life....it is, in my case, in an endeavour to save some of them, for a time, from the inevitable auto-da-fe, that they have been assembled...." James Crichton-Browne (1937) From The Doctor's Notebook The Preface, page 5.

"Sir James Crichton Browne....had a most distinguished career...." D.K. Henderson (1964) The Evolution of Psychiatry in Scotland, page 73.

Crichton-Browne usually described himself as a medical psychologist. In spite of the pervasive influence of his medical psychology, he remains a strangely neglected figure in the history of British psychiatry. His raffish demeanour, rather snobbish social attitudes, latterly repellant political views - and his elegant but convoluted Victorian prose - have doubtless contributed to this. To the modern eye, Crichton-Browne's life displays a familiarly stereotyped Victorian father-son dynamic. However, his unusual longevity, taken together with his father's distinguished psychiatric career, brought the world of the Edinburgh phrenologists - George Combe, Hewett Watson, William Ballantyne Hodgson and Robert Chambers - into contact with developing neuroscience in the course of the twentieth century - and he did not ignore the mediating influence of Duchenne de Boulogne, Pierre Paul Broca and Charles Scott Sherrington. In the medical world, he held out the promise of a continuum of neurological and psychiatric illness and in the narrower world of psychiatry he demonstrated a public role for the specialist in mental disorder. The phrenologists' concept of the brain was of a genetically determined, dynamic system vulnerable to environmental stress. Crichton-Browne's psychiatric thinking contained a remarkable blend of social and neurological concerns and his considerations of the cerebral basis of psychotic disorder were well ahead of their time.

"I don't know much about, except that he had a fine line in trenchant phraseology.... I particularly like his observation that "We are still as far as ever from mounting a delusion in Canada balsam, or from detecting despondency in a test tube." " Robert E. Kendell, personal correspondence, 21st December 2000.

"Clerk Maxwell was a teleologist, and clearly accepted design in the universe. There was in him a mystic awareness akin to that of Faraday. "I have been thinking," he said, "how very gently I have been dealt with. I have never had a violent shove in all my life." His spiritual sensibility was never stifled by his physical researches....Einstein would place him first in his trinity of great men: Newton, Faraday, Clerk Maxwell." James Crichton-Browne (1930) What The Doctor Thought, page 165.

"Clerk Maxwell, a man of real genius, noble character, and loveable disposition, had porridge and milk for his breakfast every morning, all his life". James Crichton-Browne (1932) The Doctor's After Thoughts page 46.

"....The last scene of all, a passage-at-arms, I vividly recollect. Mr Myers, standing in front of the fireplace, said: "It must be allowed that this demonstration has been a failure, and I attribute this to the offensive incredulity of Dr Crichton-Browne." To which I rejoined: "I hope I always will show offensive incredulity when I find myself in the presence of imposture." " James Crichton-Browne (1899) The Westminster Gazette and reprinted (1931) in The Doctor's Second Thoughts, pp 63-64.

"On the night on which my grandfather was drowned, his father, then living in Plymouth, awaking suddenly in the middle of the night, saw his son standing at the foot of the bed in his uniform and dripping with water....the old gentleman continued to believe till his dying day that it was a veritable wraith that he had seen." James Crichton-Browne (1938) The Doctor Remembers page 11.

Very early in his career - a week after the publication of On the Origin of Species - Crichton-Browne emphasised the importance of psychiatric disorders in childhood and, much later, he was to emphasise the distinction between organic and functional illness in the elderly. He was considered an expert in many aspects of psychological medicine, public health and social reform. He supported a campaign for the open-air treatment of tuberculosis, housing and sanitary reform for the working-classes, and a practical approach to sexually transmitted diseases. He condemned the corporal punishment of children. He stressed the importance of the asymmetric lateralization of brain function in the development of language and deplored the fads relating to ambidexterity advocated by (among others) Robert Baden-Powell. He was critical of public education systems for their repetitive and fact-bound character, warning of mental exhaustion in otherwise happy and healthy children. He was openly - even offensively - sceptical concerning the claims of psychic investigators (including Frederic William Henry Myers) and spiritualists (see The Times articles of 1897/1899 concerning the Ballechin House controversy) and of dietary faddists and vegetarians. He argued that the benefits of Freudian psychotherapy had been assessed with insufficient rigour. He advocated (in 1892) the fluoridation of human dietary intake and he worried about the consequences of mass transportation by motor vehicles.

"James Crichton-Browne is a difficult figure to place. Honoured by contemporaries, and described as one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the late nineteenth century, his appearance in the literature of the history of psychiatry is erratic." Alison M. Pearn (2010) "This Excellent Observer..."

"Crichton-Browne was not prominently linked with the Colleges of Physicians, did not occupy a senior academic position, endowed no lectures or institutions, left no textbook of psychiatry and was "owned" neither by England nor Scotland....but, in his very long life and career, there is conspicuous lineage of early asylum medicine with contemporary ideas of the cerebral basis of psychotic disorder...." Tom Walmsley (2003) Crichton-Browne's Biological Psychiatry.

"There is no short cut to longevity. To win it is the work of a lifetime." James Crichton-Browne (1905) The Prevention of Senility.

"I have been spared the worst thing that affects most people of my age - forgetfulness. There are two kinds of forgetfulness - you forget your friends, and they, as you grow older, forget you....I still have plenty of friends." James Crichton-Browne, The New York Times, Interview on his ninety-fifth birthday.

In the last years of his life, from retirement at his home "Crindau" (37 Nunholm Road) by the River Nith in the Nunholm district of Dumfries, Sir James published a notable study of Robert Burns' medical problems and physical decline based on some articles he had contributed to the Glasgow Herald, and seven volumes of memoirs selected from his commonplace books, consisting of fragmentary essays ranging widely over medical, psychological, biographical and Scottish themes. Crichton-Browne was twice married and cherished a lifelong affection for the traditions of the Anglican liturgy; he was a loyal member of the congregation at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Dumfries. Through family connections he became friendly with the painter Hannah Gluckstein ("Gluck") (1895–1978) who executed an arresting portrait of Sir James in 1928, now in the National Portrait Gallery. (Another portrait - by Sir Oswald Birley, painted in 1934 - is in the Crichton Royal Collection in Dumfries). Crichton-Browne was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1883 (with posthumous support from Charles Darwin) and he was knighted in 1886. He was a vigorous opponent of teetotalism, stating that "no writer has done much without alcohol". When he died on 31 January 1938, at the age of 97, Crichton-Browne - like Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle and James Clerk Maxwell - was acclaimed as one of the greatest sons of Dumfries and Galloway in South-West Scotland; one of the last men in Britain to sport Dundreary whiskers - and as one of the last Victorians.