Crichton-Browne, James

   (1840–1938)

   A pioneer of the study of mental illness in Britain, he was born in Edinburgh, the son of William A. F. Browne (1805–1885), superintendent of the Crichton Royal Institute at Dumfries (the foremost asylum in Scotland) and of Magdalene Howden, a Shakespearian scholar. (Crichton-Browne received "Crichton" as his second Christian name in honor of James Crichton, the benefactor of the Dumfries asylum, and he later added it to his surname.) He read medicine at Edinburgh University, qualifying as a surgeon in 1861 and earning an M.D. with a thesis on hallucinations in 1862. After serving on the medical staff of several provincial asylums, in 1866 he became medical director of the large West Riding asylum at Wakefield, also lecturing in psychiatry at Leeds University. He began the annual West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, which included notable scientific articles. (Crichton-Browne also co-edited the journal Brain from 1878 to 1885.) He left the West Riding asylum in 1875 and removed to London to become a "Visitor in Lunacy," or mental-hospital inspector, and continued in that function until he retired in 1922. In London, he also became one of the first British psychiatrists to have an extensive private practice.

   Crichton-Browne is known for having introduced the scientific study of psychiatry to British asylums, and his most distinguished visiting fellow was probably neurophysiologist David Ferrier (1843–1928), who did research at Wakefield in the early 1870s. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Crichton-Browne published a series of amusing popular books containing observations about life and medicine, such as Victorian Jottings (1926) and What the Doctor Thought (1930), many of which retain their charm. "Crichton-Browne’s true faith was the brain," write his biographers Michael Neve and Trevor Turner, quoting him: "The brain-cell is an altar before which spiritual unions take place, a tabernacle in which the holy of holies is enshrined" (Medical History, 1995, p. 417).