Introduction and Site Guide

These pages explore the life of Sir James Crichton-Browne, one of the most famous Victorian 'nerve doctors.' He was born in Edinburgh, the son of another famous psychiatrist, Dr W A F Browne, first superintendent of Crichton Royal, Dumfries, and raised and educated in Dumfries and at Edinburgh University. See Family History and Early Days.

At the early age of 26 he was appointed as medical director of the West Riding Asylum at Wakefield, and in nine busy years established the hospital as a leading centre of research and treatment. He was a skilled administrator and showman, and assisted Charles Darwin in his research.

He moved to London in 1876 and became the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, a post he held for forty-six years. He reported for the government on Over-pressure of work in Elementary Schools, and lectured and wrote on an incredibly diverse range of topics for the rest of his life. These included spiritualism, children's health and education, dental caries, Robert Burns, and psychoanalysis.

He met Thomas Carlyle and his family in London - see below - and after Carlyle's death wrote extensively about him and his wife Jane Carlyle. He was deeply involved in the disputes between the Carlyle family and Froude, Carlyle's biographer.

Despite six volumes of reminiscences, he revealed little of his personal life.

Conclusions, a list of his honours, references and links can also be found in these pages.

A Meeting

One day in June 1877, Thomas Carlyle, 81 years of age, accompanied by his niece Mary Aitken, left 5 Cheyne Row in a carriage. They travelled north, past Hyde Park where his wife died 11 years earlier, and up the east side of Regents Park to Cumberland Terrace, where they stopped at the house of Dr and Mrs James Crichton-Browne, who had moved to London the previous year. Crichton-Browne recorded the visit in his commonplace book:

‘He was in a landau and was too feeble to leave it, so I went out and stood chatting with him while Mary Aitken went into the house to see my wife. He was all gentleness and affability, not a gruff word or impatient look, but he was frail and weary, and the partial loss of power in his right hand was perceptible. We, perhaps it was I, talked of Dumfries, and his brother John and my brother John, to whom he had been kind, and then, rejoined by his niece and nodding his head in friendly farewell, he drove away into the immensities.

In this last talk I brought a smile on Carlyle’s time-beaten face by telling him that, in spite of the futility of the many kinds of medical treatment tried in his lifelong dyspepsia, he had done much-needed justice to my profession, and recalled to him a line or two from a letter of his to Hutchison Stirling, the author of The Secret of Hegel: “What profession is there equal in true nobleness to medicine? He that can abolish pain, relieve his fellow-mortal from sickness, he is indisputably the usefullest of men. He is in the right, be wrong who may!…..”

Four years later Carlyle would die; Crichton-Browne, at this time 37, would be knighted by Queen Victoria nine years later, in 1886. Subsequently, he was to write extensively and controversially about the Carlyles, but even at the time of this meeting he had achieved much, securing his place in psychiatric history. He was to live to an active old age, publishing his last book in 1937, the year of his death. Born in 1840 he heard, as a teenager, Thackeray lecture in Dumfries, and lived to deliver a broadcast talk on the BBC.