James Crichton-Browne - Darwin, Ferrier and The Wakefield Reports 1866 - 1875

1875

Crichton-Browne studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where his uncle was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine; he qualified MRCS in 1861, and MD in 1862 with a thesis on hallucinations. Among his teachers was his father's friend Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) whose "magnum opus" Mind and Brain is an extended speculative essay on neurology and psychological life. Crichton-Browne also drew on the writings of the physicians Sir Andrew Halliday and Sir Henry Holland. Like his father, Crichton-Browne had been elected one of the undergraduate Presidents of the Royal Medical Society and, in this capacity, he argued for the place of psychology in the medical curriculum. After working as assistant physician in asylums in Exeter (with John Charles Bucknill), Warwick and Derby, and a brief period on Tyneside, Crichton-Browne was appointed Physician-Superintendent of the West Riding Asylum at Wakefield in 1866; this was the year in which his father served as the first President of the reconstituted Medico-Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists); and, in his Presidential address delivered at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, W.A.F. Browne gave a rather laborious account of the principles of medical psychology and recorded the deaths of John Conolly (1794–1866) and Sir Alexander Morison (1779–1866).

Crichton-Browne spent ten years at the West Riding Asylum. He believed that the asylum should be an educational as well as a therapeutic institution and set about a major research programme, bringing biological insights to bear on the causes of insanity. He supervised hundreds of post-mortem examinations of the brain and took a special interest in the clinical features of neurosyphilis. In 1872, Crichton-Browne invited the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier (1843–1928) to direct the asylum laboratories and to conduct electrical studies on the cortical localization of cerebral functions, a research initiative which echoed Duchenne de Boulogne's revival of Galvani's experiments and which developed the phrenological theories of Crichton-Browne's father, William A.F.Browne. (In 1832-1834, William A.F. Browne had published a serial paper in the Phrenological Journal on the relationship of mental disorder to a disturbance of language, and in some of his later writings there was a reiterated emphasis on the relationships of brain injury, psychosis and language). On the more general confluence of Crichton-Browne's thinking with his father's phrenology, see the papers by Walmsley, 1993 and 2003. Ferrier summarised his scientific work at the Wakefield asylum in his neurological classic The Functions of the Brain.

"One is tempted to believe phrenologists are right about habitual exercise of the mind altering form of head, and thus these qualities become hereditary." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

"As my present opportunities did not admit of my giving you satisfactory information....I sent the letter on to my friend Dr C. Browne, medical superintendent of the West Riding Asylum, who has upwards of 1000 insane patients under his constant observation, and whose acquirements are of a high order....I trust that you may find the results useful...." (Henry Maudsley to Charles Darwin, 20th May, 1869).

"I do not know how to thank you enough for your M.S. observations on expression. They contain exactly and fully the information which I wanted, and.... are most interesting and so graphic as to be almost painful." (Charles Darwin to James Crichton-Browne, 22nd May 1869).

"The extraordinary condition of the hair in the insane is due not only to its erection, but to its dryness and harshness, consequent on the subcutaneous glands failing to act. Dr Bucknill has said that a lunatic "is a lunatic to his fingers' ends"; he might have added, "and often to the extremity of each particular hair."" Charles Darwin (1872) The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals, page 297.

"It seems that the physiology of the brain will soon be completely understood." (Charles Darwin to James Crichton-Browne, concerning David Ferrier's experiments at Wakefield, 17th April 1873).

At the instigation of Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), Crichton-Browne corresponded with Charles Darwin (1809–1882) from May 1869 until December 1875. The bulk of the correspondence occurred during the preparation of Crichton-Browne's famous West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports and also of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. On 8 June 1869, Darwin sent Crichton-Browne his copy of Duchenne's Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, asking for his comments. Crichton-Browne seems to have mislaid the book for about a year at the Wakefield asylum; but, on 6 June 1870, he returned it (with some embarrassment) to Darwin, along with an illustration of a woman with occasionally erected hair from the Southern Counties Asylum at Dumfries. Darwin explored a huge range of subjects with Crichton-Browne, including references to Maudsley's Body and Mind, the psychology of blushing, the functions of the platysma muscle (Darwin's "bête noire"), and the clinical phenomena of bereavement and grief. Darwin's mysterious symptoms which included vomiting, sweating, sighing, and weeping, particularly troublesome in the early months of 1872, seem to have largely resolved around the time that he completed his work on the origins of the human emotions.

" Browne and I often talk of you and the old Plinian Society days when as young naturalists we discussed many points of interest which have since occupied prominent places in Science." (Professor J. Hutton Balfour to Charles Darwin, 14th January, 1862).

"Enclosed in Duchenne (at the beginning) you will find a few crude notes on expression. I promise you more, in a little time....I send you a photograph of a female patient in the Southern Counties Asylum, Dumfries, N.B., under the care of Dr Gilchrist....We are beginning to take large photographs here, the size of Duchenne's....I shall send you some." (Crichton-Browne to Charles Darwin, 6th June 1870).

"Blushing is generally a public performance, but I succeeded in satisfying Darwin that it may occur in solitude and in the dark....I explained to Darwin that the case which I described to him....was illustrative of the rapid extension, under increased emotional perturbation, of the vaso-motor paralysis in which blushing really consists." James Crichton-Browne (1930) What the Doctor Thought, pp 64-65.

"April 20th 1882 - Charles Darwin has passed away, and with him I have lost a friend, illustrious and kind. Recalling my delightful intercourse with him, I pick out of a sheaf of letters one showing, as indeed they all do, the scrupulous care with which his inquiries were conducted, his marvellous suggestiveness, and his generous acknowledgement of any help given to him." James Crichton-Browne (published in) What the Doctor Thought (1930), page 61.

Building on the early psychiatric photography of Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 -1886) at Brookwood Hospital (Surrey's second County Asylum), Crichton-Browne sent about forty photographs of patients to Charles Darwin during the composition of his The Expression of the Emotions; however, Darwin used only one of these in the book (Figure 19) and this (Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 7220) was of the patient (with occasional erection of her hair "like wire") (photographer unknown) - under the care of Dr James Gilchrist at the Southern Counties Asylum, the public wing of (Crichton Royal) at Dumfries. The complete correspondence between Crichton-Browne and Charles Darwin forms a remarkable contribution to the beginnings of behavioural science. Nevertheless, Crichton-Browne attached greater importance to his six volumes of West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (1871–1876) (Jellinek, 2005) - sending Darwin a copy of Volume One on 18 August 1871 - and to the neurological journal Brain which developed from them, in which he was assisted by John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911), David Ferrier (1843-1928) and John Charles Bucknill (1817-1897) . Interestingly, Crichton-Browne declined Henry Maudsley's invitation to review The Descent of Man for The Journal of Mental Science; and it is notable that Charles Darwin did not make a contribution to Crichton-Browne's Asylum Reports, nor did he visit the West Riding asylum when invited by Crichton-Browne in 1873.

"Of all the classifications of insanity with which we have been afflicted in recent times, none has been more diligently vaunted, or more frequently obtruded upon attention, than that of the late Dr Skae." James Crichton-Browne (1875) The Journal of Mental Science.

In 1875, Crichton-Browne ridiculed the classification of mental disorders produced by the Edinburgh psychiatrist David Skae (1814–1873) which had been promoted by Skae's pupil Thomas Clouston (1840–1915); Skae had sought to associate specific forms of mental disorder with diseased states of various bodily organs. Crichton-Browne characterised it as "philosophically unsound, scientifically inaccurate and practically useless". In 1879, Crichton-Browne published his own considerations of the neuropathology of insanity making some exact predictions about the morbid anatomy of the human brain in cases of severe psychiatric disorder: he proposed that in the insane the weight of the brain was reduced, that the lateral ventricles were enlarged and that the burden of damage fell on the left cerebral hemisphere. This involved an evolutionary view of cerebral localisation with an emphasis on the asymmetry of cerebral functions which he derived from the clinical research of the French neurologist Paul Broca (1824–1880) on language centres in the brain - originally published in 1861 - and presented by Broca to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its 1868 meeting in Norwich (chaired by Joseph Dalton Hooker). The question of asymmetrical cerebral functions had been raised many years earlier by the Edinburgh phrenologist Hewett Cottrell Watson in the Phrenological Journal. Crichton-Browne summarised his own views on psychosis and cerebral asymmetry in his most important scientific paper: On The Weight of the Brain (1879); and the best appraisals of this paper are by Crow, 1995 and Compston, 2007.