Sir James Crichton-Browne

Abstract No Victorian or Edwardian alienist assumed the scientific and moral responsibilities of his work with greater confidence than did James Crichton-Browne. During the course of his career, he sampled nearly all of the professional opportunities open to British psychiatry in these decades, serving as resident medical officer at several public asylums, lecturing on mental disease at provincial medical schools, editing journals, inspecting the treatment of lunatics as a government official, and advising private patients as a fashionable psychiatric consultant. Browne's approach to mental illness revealed the uneasy coexistence of physiological and psychological interpretations that characterized the work of British psychiatrists throughout the 19th century. On the one hand, he espoused the physical model, unequivocally affirming the conviction that somatic conditions gave rise to the symptoms of mental derangement. On the other hand, Browne conceded real potency to moral means, even if their impact could only be perceived somatically.