Biography
Richard Maurice Bucke was born in 1837, in Methwold, England the son of Rev. Horatio Walpole Bucke (a parish curate) and his wife Clarissa Andrews. The parents and their children emigrated to Canada when Richard Maurice was a year old, settling near London, Ontario. A sibling in a large family, he had a typical farm boyhood of that era (his father, H. W. Bucke, having given up the role of religious minister as a profession). When Richard Maurice left home aged 16, he traveled south to the U.S. for new sights and adventure from Columbus, Ohio west to California, working manually at odd jobs along the way. He was part of a traveling party who had to fight for their lives under attack from the Shoshone, whose territory they traversed.
In the winter of 1857-58, he was nearly frozen in the mountains of California, where he was the sole survivor of a silver mining party. He had to walk out over the mountains, suffering severe exposure (losing a foot and several toes) and a long recovery. He returned to Canada via the Isthmus of Panama in 1858.
Bucke enrolled in McGill University's medical school in Montreal, where he delivered a distinguished thesis in 1862. Though he practiced general medicine briefly as a ship's surgeon, in order to pay for his sea travel, Bucke went on to specialize in psychiatry. He did his internship in London, England (1862-3 at the University College Hospital), and while on the east shores of the Atlantic Ocean, visited France. Bucke was for a number of years an enthusiast for Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy. As Huston Smith has said of Comte's view, "Auguste Comte had laid down the line: religion belonged to the childhood of the human race... All genuine knowledge is contained within the boundaries of science." Comte's point about "religion" having been outmoded by science is in some ways in keeping with, and yet also in sharp contrast with, Bucke's later position concerning the nature of reality.
He returned to Canada in 1864 and married Jessie Gurd in 1865. The couple had eight children.
In January 1876, Bucke became Superintendent of the Asylum for the Insane in Hamilton; in 1877 he was appointed head of the provincial Asylum for the Insane in London, Ontario, a post he held for nearly the remainder of his life. Bucke was a progressive for his day, believing in humane contact and normalization of routines in the institution. Bucke encouraged organized sports and what we would now call occupational therapy.
Bucke enjoyed reading poetry. He always had friends among the literati and lovers of literature (especially poetry). In 1869 he read, and was deeply impressed by, Leaves of Grass by American poet Walt Whitman. He met Whitman in 1877 in Camden and the two developed a lasting friendship. Bucke eventually testified that he was "lifted to and set upon a higher plane of existence" thanks to Whitman. He published a biography of the poet in 1883, and was one of Whitman's literary executors.
Bucke developed a theory of human intellectual and emotional evolution, and, besides publishing and delivering professional papers, wrote a book on his theory titled Man's Moral Nature, published in 1879. In 1882 he was elected to the English Literature Section of the Royal Society of Canada.
On February 19, 1902, Bucke slipped on a patch of ice in front of his home and struck his head and died a few hours later.
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