James Crichton-Browne

Crichton-Browne edited the highly influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (six volumes, 1871–76). He was one of Charles Darwin's leading collaborators – on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – and, like Duchenne de Boulogne (at the Salpêtrière in Paris) and Hugh Welch Diamond in Surrey, was a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography. He based himself at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield from 1866 to 1875, and there he taught psychiatry to students from the nearby Leeds School of Medicine and, with David Ferrier, transformed the asylum into a world centre for neuropsychology. Crichton-Browne then served as Lord Chancellor's Visitor from 1875 till 1922. Throughout his career, Crichton-Browne emphasised the asymmetrical aspects of the human brain and behaviour; and also, like Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer, made some influential predictions about the neurological changes associated with severe psychiatric disorders. Crichton-Browne was also a forceful advocate of eugenics, and in 1908 became the first president of the Eugenics Education Society. In 1920, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Medico-Psychological Association in the course of which he outlined his recollections of Henry Maudsley; and in the last fifteen years of his life, he published seven volumes of reminiscences. In 2015, UNESCO listed Crichton-Browne's clinical papers and photographs (about 5000 items in all) as items of international cultural importance.

James Crichton-Browne studied at University of Edinburgh and Dumfries Academy. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is medicine, psychiatry and neurology. George Combe is recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with Royal Medical Society. Distinctions recorded are Fellow of the Royal Society and Knight Bachelor.

• Born — 29 November 1840 • Birthplace — Edinburgh, Scotland • Died — 31 January 1938 • Place of death — Dumfries, Scotland • Fields — psychiatry, public health, medical psychology • Education — Edinburgh University • Known for — Functional specialization (brain), cerebral asymmetry, biological psychiatry, medical history, photography, memoirist • Workplaces — Royal Medical Society, West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Court of Chancery, Medico-Psychological Association, Royal Institution, Royal Society

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 Balfour home (at St John's Hill near Salisbury Crags) had been constructed in 1770 for the unmarried geologist James Hutton (1726–1797) who was Magdalene Balfour's great-uncle. Crichton-Browne's father, the asylum reformer William A. F. Browne (1805–1885), was a prominent phrenologist and his younger brother, John Hutton Balfour-Browne KC (1845–1921), wrote a classic account of the legal relations of insanity. Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood at The Crichton Royal in Dumfries, where his father was the 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 illustrated by their group activities, dreams and art-works. W. A. F. Browne also 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 an older brother, William (aged 11) in 1846. He went to school at Dumfries Academy and then, in line with his mother's episcopalian outlook, to Glenalmond College. Shortly before his death, Crichton-Browne wrote a valuable account of his Dumfries childhood, including the visit of the American asylum reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix. Crichton-Browne studied medicine at Edinburgh University, qualifying as an MD in 1862 with a thesis on hallucinations. Among his teachers was his father's friend Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) whose magnum opus Mind and Brain is an extended speculative essay on neurology and psychological life. Crichton-Browne also drew on the writings of the physicians Sir Andrew Halliday and Sir Henry Holland. Like his father, Crichton-Browne was elected one of the undergraduate Presidents of the Royal Medical Society and, in this capacity, he argued for the place of psychology in the medical curriculum. In 1863, he visited a number of asylums in Paris (including the Salpêtrière), and after working as assistant physician at asylums in Exeter (with John Charles Bucknill), Warwick and Derby, and a brief period on Tyneside, Crichton-Browne was appointed physician-superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in 1866. This was also the year in which his father served as the president of the Medico-Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists).

Ferrier's neurology: Crichton-Browne spent almost ten years at the West Riding Asylum. He believed that the asylum should be an educational as well as a therapeutic institution and set about a major research programme, bringing biological insights to bear on the causes of insanity. He supervised hundreds of post-mortem examinations of the brain and took a special interest in the clinical features of neurosyphilis. In 1872, Crichton-Browne developed his father's phrenological theories by inviting the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier (1843–1928) to direct the asylum laboratories and to conduct studies on the cortical localization of cerebral functions. (In 1832–34, William A. F. Browne had published a paper in the Phrenological Journal on language centres in the brain and in his later writings there is a reiterated emphasis on the relationships of brain injury, psychosis and language). Ferrier's work at Wakefield transformed the asylum into a world centre for neuropsychiatry and he summarised his research in the neurological classic The Functions of the Brain (1876). Darwin's correspondence: At the instigation of Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), Crichton-Browne corresponded with Charles Darwin from May 1869 until December 1875. The bulk of the correspondence occurred during the preparation of Crichton-Browne's famous West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports and of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. On 8 June 1869, Darwin sent Crichton-Browne his copy of Duchenne's Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, asking for his comments. Crichton-Browne seems to have mislaid the book for almost a year at the Wakefield asylum; but, on 6 June 1870, he returned it with considerable embarrassment, and enclosed the one psychiatric photograph which Darwin used in his book (see below). Darwin explored a huge range of subjects with Crichton-Browne, including references to Maudsley's Body and Mind, the psychology of blushing, the bristling of hair, the functions of the platysma muscle (Darwin's "bête noire"), and the clinical phenomena of bereavement and grief. Darwin's mysterious symptoms which included vomiting, sweating, sighing, and weeping, particularly troublesome in the early months of 1872, seem to have improved around the time that he completed his work on the emotions. Interestingly, Crichton-Browne declined Henry Maudsley's invitation to review The Descent of Man for The Journal of Mental Science; and it is notable that Darwin did not make a contribution to Crichton-Browne's Asylum Reports, nor did he visit the Wakefield Asylum when invited by Crichton-Browne in 1873. Mental Science: Building on the early asylum photography of Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 -1886) at Brookwood Hospital, Crichton-Browne sent about forty photographs of patients to Charles Darwin during the composition of his The Expression of the Emotions; however, Darwin used only one of these in the book (Figure 19) and this (Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 7220) was of a patient under the care of Dr James Gilchrist in the public wing of Crichton Royal at Dumfries. The complete correspondence between Crichton-Browne and Charles Darwin forms a remarkable contribution to the beginnings of behavioural science. Nevertheless, Crichton-Browne attached greater importance to his six volumes of West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (1871–1876) – sending Darwin a copy of Volume One on 18 August 1871 – and to the neurological journal Brain which developed from them, in which he was assisted by John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911). In 1875, Crichton-Browne criticised the classification of mental disorders advocated by the Edinburgh psychiatrist David Skae (1814–1873) which had been promoted by Skae's pupil Thomas Clouston (1840–1915); Skae sought to associate specific kinds of mental illness with variously disordered bodily organs. Crichton-Browne described it as: "philosophically unsound, scientifically inaccurate and practically useless". In 1879, Crichton-Browne published his own considerations of the neuropathology of insanity making some detailed predictions about the morbid anatomy of the brain in cases of severe psychiatric disorder. He proposed that, in the insane, the weight of the brain was reduced, that the lateral ventricles were enlarged, and that the burden of damage fell on the left cerebral hemisphere. These observations - made almost a century before the introduction of neuroleptics - involved an evolutionary view of cerebral localisation with an emphasis on the asymmetry of cerebral functions. He derived this from the clinical research of the French anatomist Paul Broca (1824–1880) on language centres in the brain – originally published in 1861 – and presented by Broca to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its 1868 meeting in Norwich. The question of asymmetrical cerebral functions had been raised many years earlier by the Edinburgh phrenologist Hewett Cottrell Watson in the Phrenological Journal. Crichton-Browne's own views on psychosis and cerebral asymmetry have been appraised by Crow, 1995 and Compston, 2007.

Crichton-Browne was elected and re-elected President of the Sanitary Inspectors' Association on an unprecedented twenty occasions. Like his predecessors, Sir Edwin Chadwick, and Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, he took a close interest in the affairs of the Association. He greatly assisted the Association's negotiations with the Local Government Board (predecessor of the Ministry of Health) in its attempts to secure the improved education and training of sanitary inspectors. These attempts faced opposition from some sectors of the medical profession which viewed the rise of the sanitary inspectors as a threat to Medical Officers of Health. He was regarded with much affection and respect by the sanitary inspectors and he was a frequently invited speaker at their conferences and dinners — although his speeches could be repetitive and lengthy. In 1914, on being re-elected for a further term as President, he responded: The Sanitary Journal, November 1914, 10, No. 6, p. 107

In the early Summer of 1920, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, giving a generous tribute to Henry Maudsley whose enthusiasm and energy in the 1860s had been a source of inspiration to Crichton-Browne. Four years later, on 29 February 1924, Crichton-Browne gave the Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture in Edinburgh: The Story of the Brain. In this, he delivered a tribute to members of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society: to George Combe (1788–1858) 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 depression, and published in 1844. Chambers simply inverted 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. With increasing age and the death of his first wife (Emily Halliday; following her death in 1903, Crichton-Browne married Audrey Emily Bulwer in 1912), and with the loss of two grandsons in the first world war, Crichton-Browne's rhetoric took on a more strident tone and his engagement with eugenics tarnished his reputation in the last two decades of his life.

He died, following a fall and suffering from heart failure, in Dumfries on 31 January 1938. He was predeceased by his son Colonel Harold Crichton-Browne (1866–1937).

• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1870) • Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1883) • Knighted by Queen Victoria (1886) • President of the Medico-Psychological Association • President of the Neurological Society • President of the Medical Society of London • President of the National Health Society • Treasurer and vice-president of the Royal Institution • President of the Eugenics Education Society