James Crichton-Browne - Elder Statesman of British Psychiatry 1920 - 1938

1938

"I had the good fortune to be, for a short time, a pupil of Lord Lister in his Edinburgh days before he went to Glasgow....I could, I think, trace out some curious analogies between Plato and Lister. Lister was a disciple of Syme, and Syme was Socratic in his methods.... published four editions of his work - A System of Surgery - and each edition became smaller than the one which had preceded it as he became more definite and succinct in his conclusions....Plato derived much from Pythagoras, and so did Lister from Pasteur...." James Crichton-Browne (1937) From The Doctor's Notebook, page 60.

"The Avoidance of Love: General Gordon, I believe, several times wrote in letters from country houses in which he was visiting: "Miss So-and-so is becoming too fascinating. I must be off." " James Crichton-Browne (1937) From The Doctor's Notebook, page 55.

"Maudsley was revealed to me in a brilliant essay on Edgar Allan Poe, which was published in the Journal of Mental Science in April, 1860, and which, although too scathing, was so rich in insight....as to betoken "the lighting of another taper at Heaven," which was at that time Maudsley's way of describing the arrival of a new man of genius on the scene....Maudsley's pathway and mine diverged physically after these racy and roseate London days when my lot was cast in the provinces for a decade....but whatever differences of conviction and outlook separated us, our friendship remained unbroken to the end." James Crichton-Browne The First Maudsley Lecture, delivered at the Royal Society of Medicine, Wimpole Street, London, 20th May 1920.

In the early Summer of 1920, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, giving an affecting tribute to Henry Maudsley whose enthusiasm and energy in the 1860s had been a source of inspiration and encouragement to him. He spoke with some feeling of Maudsley the man, and of the divergence of their pathways in the later development of British psychiatry, regretting Maudsley's social and professional withdrawal in the last thirty years of his life. Crichton-Browne, rather in awe of Maudsley's intellectual powers, seems to have flinched at the less forgiving aspects of Maudsley's emotional landscape.

"I can conceive of a man learned in all the wisdom of the psychologians who would be a less successful asylum medical officer than one with quick insight, wholesome imagination and vivid sympathy who altogether ignored Freud and Hegel. There is a tactus eruditus in handling the morbid mind that only personal practice can confer...." James Crichton-Browne (1920) The First Maudsley Lecture.

"I recollect Professor Balfour telling me that....in 1860, a year after the publication of The Origin of Species, there was a sharp discussion on that subject, in which Chambers, although present, took no part. As they left the meeting, however, Chambers turned to Balfour and said, "I think the Vestiges still holds its own," on which Balfour, challenging him, said, "And you are the Vestiges ?" and he nodded his head." James Crichton-Browne (1930) What the Doctor Thought, page 40.

"Vestiges is highly readable, but not always easy to understand." James A. Secord (1994) Introduction to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, reprinted edition, page xi.

"One of the admirable things about Chambers is the way in which he moves so easily between what we now regard as the poetic and the scientific....In conducting his life Robert Chambers also came to be able to meld labour and leisure so the two might enhance each other....by this time he was well advanced with Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and, excursing with friends through the countryside around St Andrews, manifestly recovered and happy." Robert Crawford (2011) The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography, page 120.

"The Constitution of Man on its first appearance was received in Edinburgh with an odium theologicum, analogous to that afterwards stirred up by the Vestiges of Creation and The Origin of Species.....Moved by early predilection, - my father, a phrenologist of the old school, was assistant to George Combe at his lectures for a time, and was also for some years one of the Henderson Trustees - I have dipped into that old controversy and....this I will say, the phrenologists, notwithstanding their egregious errors, had the best of it both in argument and temper." James Crichton-Browne, The Story of the Brain, the second Ramsay Henderson Lecture delivered in Edinburgh on Friday, 29th February 1924.

Four years later, on 29 February 1924, Crichton-Browne gave the Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture in Edinburgh and this lecture forms a kind of peroration to his public career. His title was The Story of the Brain. In this, he gave a remarkable tribute to members of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society - to George Combe (1788–1858), the author of The Constitution of Man (1828), to Andrew Combe (1797–1847) author of Observations on Mental Derangement (1831) - and to Robert Chambers (1802–1871) who had sought to combine phrenology with evolutionary Lamarckism in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation - written in St Andrews as Chambers recuperated from a complex psychiatric disorder, published in 1844 and inverting Hutton's aphorism "no vestige of a beginning". However, Crichton-Browne did not mention that his Henderson lecture was delivered a century (almost to the day) after his father had joined the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.

"My first visit to St Andrews was in 1857, when I had just entered as a student in the University of Edinburgh, and thanks to the fact that I was under the wing of my uncle, Professor Balfour, I was shown over the ancient buildings - the Culdee Tower, the Castle rock, the Cathedral wall - by Sir David Brewster, who was to Carlyle "a grand superficial man", but who was to me a bit of a magician, as the inventor of the kaleidoscope in which I had seen so many fantastic suggestions. Carlyle was a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews in 1827 when Chalmers left for Edinburgh, and was greatly disappointed that he did not obtain it....St Andrews, in its grey monotone, has a singular charm for all beholders." James Crichton-Browne (1938) The Doctor Remembers, page 32.

With increasing age, with the death of his first wife, and with the loss of two grandsons in the first world war, Crichton-Browne's rhetoric took on a more strident tone and this compromised his reputation in the last two decades of his life.