James Crichton-Browne

Who was James Crichton-Browne?

Sir James Crichton-Browne MD FRS was a leading British psychiatrist and medical psychologist. He is known for studies on the relationship of mental illness to brain injury and for the development of public health policies in relation to mental health. Crichton-Browne was the second son of the phrenologist Dr. William A.F. Browne.

Crichton-Browne was an author and orator, editor of the highly influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, one of Charles Darwin's correspondents and collaborators – on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals – and – like Duchenne de Boulogne and Hugh Welch Diamond – a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography. Crichton-Browne was based at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield from 1866 to 1875, and there he set up a unique asylum laboratory, establishing instruction in psychiatry for students from the nearby Leeds School of Medicine. In 1895, he delivered his celebrated Cavendish Lecture On Dreamy Mental States which attracted the disapproval of the American psychologist William James.