James Crichton-Browne - Family Background and Education

Family Background and Education

"My grandfather's house was a rather quaint and grim specimen of Scottish domestic architecture of the conventional type of the middle of the eighteenth century. He had inherited it from his grand-uncle, a really great man, a vigorous and versatile genius, James Hutton, who may be be styled the father of modern geology. It was at St John's Hill that he....wrote The Theory of the Earth, that geological classic, and many other dissertations....which contain pregnant suggestions on the physical and philosophical problems which are being at present so earnestly discussed". James Crichton-Browne (1938) The Doctor Remembers, page 17.

"In all the ages of the world....theologians, philosophers, and legislators....have agreed as to the importance to be attached to the physical, mental and moral training of infancy and childhood." James Crichton-Browne, Psychical Diseases of Early Life, paper read before the Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, Friday, 2nd December 1859.

Crichton-Browne was born in Edinburgh at the family home of his mother, Magdalene Howden Balfour. She was the daughter of Dr Andrew Balfour and belonged to one of Scotland's foremost scientific families - the home (at St John's Hill near Salisbury Crags) had been built in 1770 for the unmarried geologist James Hutton (1726–1797). Hutton was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and his geological theories involving physical processes exerted over unimaginable periods of time ("...no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end...") laid much of the foundation for modern environmental science.

Crichton-Browne's father, the asylum reformer William A.F. Browne (1805–1885), was a prominent phrenologist. Crichton-Browne's younger brother, John Hutton Balfour-Browne K.C. (1845–1921), wrote a classic work on the legal relations of insanity and his first cousin, Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour (1853–1922), was Sherardian Professor at Oxford and, later, Professor of Botany at Edinburgh.

Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood at the Crichton Royal asylum in Dumfries where his father was the first medical superintendent from 1838 to 1857. William A.F. Browne was a pioneering Victorian psychiatrist and an exponent of moral treatment with an interest in the psychological lives of his patients as evidenced by their group activities, symptoms, dreams and art-works. During his twenty years at the Crichton Royal, W.A.F. Browne hoarded a huge collection of patient art and this interest found a parallel in Crichton-Browne's later asylum photography. In his childhood, Crichton-Browne lost two siblings: his older brother, William (aged 11 years) in 1846 and his sister Jessie (aged 10 years) in 1852. He went to school at Dumfries Academy and then, in line with his mother's episcopalian outlook, to Trinity College, Glenalmond. Shortly before his death, Crichton-Browne wrote a valuable account of his Dumfries childhood, including a description of the visit of the American asylum reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix, and this was published as a Foreword to Charles Easterbrook's Chronicle of the Crichton Royal in 1940.

"I was not in those days interested in asylum administration, but I remember overhearing at table Miss Dix's warmly approbatory remarks on much that she saw in the Crichton Royal Institution, and her inquiries as to the composition of some distinctly Scottish dishes, such as kail, shortbread, scones, oatcakes, and haggis, recipes for which she obtained and carried off with her to the United States." James Crichton-Browne (1940) Some Early Crichton Memories.

"I am a personal link with Burns, having as a boy often chatted with his eldest son Robert, as he fished in the Nith dressed in a black tailed coat and a tall hat in the years 1854-1855, some twenty years after his retirement from his appointment in the Stamp Office in London....he wrote a few songs and miscellaneous pieces not without merit. He never displayed any spark of his father's genius. Both in London and Dumfries, however, he supplemented his modest income by giving lessons in classics and mathematics." James Crichton-Browne (1931) The Doctor's Second Thoughts, page 79.