James Crichton-Browne - Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy 1875 - 1922

1922

In 1875, Crichton-Browne was appointed as Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, a position which involved the regular examination of wealthy Chancery patients throughout England and Wales. He held this post until his retirement in 1922 and he combined it with the development of an extensive London consulting practice, becoming a familiar figure on the metropolitan medical scene. In 1878, he followed his father as President of the Medico-Psychological Association; in 1883, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; and he served as Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Institution from 1889 till 1926. Crichton-Browne also made friendships in the literary world with the idiosyncratic historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) whose marital reputation he defended against the allegations of James Anthony Froude; and, less controversially, with his exact contemporary, the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) who consulted Crichton-Browne about the anatomical peculiarities of the female brain. Crichton-Browne informed Hardy that the brain/body ratio was much the same in women as in men; but it is not clear that he drew Hardy's attention to the greater symmetry of female nervous structure.

"George Herbert was wrong when he said that man was all symmetry; it was woman to whom that remark applied....evolution is still going on, and the faces of men and women still altering.... The emotions are less violently expressed....our ancestors gave vent to their feelings in a way that we would be ashamed of, and their range of feeling seems to have been in some degree more limited. The language of the countenance, like that of the tongue, has been enriched in the process of the suns." James Crichton-Browne, On Emotional Expression, the Presidential Address, Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, delivered in Free St George's Hall, Dumfries on Thursday, 24th January 1895.

"All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of "the Expression of the Emotions" which, as Darwin has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us to be only a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally, and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words...." Sigmund Freud (1895) Studies On Hysteria.

"Not less ominous than visceral sensations in connection with dreamy states are actions which are repeated....for these indicate a deepening or diffusion of the cerebral disturbance which makes it correspond with somnambulism rather than with dreaming. Running movements may only betoken the dominant emotion of fear; masticatory movements, smacking of the lips and spitting, may mean a crude sensation of taste, but spasmodic movements are premonitory of convulsions..." James Crichton-Browne Dreamy Mental States, London, Sunday, 30th June 1895.

Crichton-Browne was a notable stylist and orator and he often combined this with a kind of couthy vernacular evocative of the Dumfries of his childhood. He was proud to have served as President of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society from 1892 to 1896 and, on 24 January 1895, he gave a remarkable and light-hearted Presidential lecture - in Dumfries - On Emotional Expression - in which he discussed some reservations about Darwin's views and touched on the role of the motor cortex in expression, on the relations of gender to expressive asymmetry and on the relationship of language to the physical expression of the emotions. A few months later, on 30 June 1895 in London, Crichton-Browne delivered his famous Cavendish Lecture on Dreamy Mental States, in which he explored the relationship of trauma in the uniquely vulnerable temporal lobes to déjà vu, hallucinatory and supernatural experiences; this caught the attention of William James (1842-1910) who referred - rather dismissively - to Crichton-Browne in his Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience (delivered in Edinburgh in 1901-1902). In the early years of the twentieth century, Crichton-Browne delivered a number of lectures on the asymmetry of the human brain, publishing his conclusions in 1907.

"Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of "dreamy states" to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness. They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent, but which never completes itself. In Dr Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity..." William James (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience - The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion: Lecture 16: Mysticism.