Abstract
SIR JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE, who died on January 31 at the age of ninety-seven years, was born at Dumfries in 1840. His father was Dr. W.A.F. Browne, who became Commissioner on Lunacy for Scotland, and was at the time of his son's birth head of a famous private asylum in Dumfries-the Crichton Royal Institution. Crichton-Browne as a boy saw his father applying new methods to the treatment of the insane ; they were treated as if they were rational human beings-they were employed according to their bent in the day-time, entertained in the evening and surrounded with the comforts of a home. His father believed in education—particularly of the young medical men who were to devote their lives to the care and treatment of insanity. It was in the late fifties of last century, when Crichton-Browne was a medical student in the University of Edinburgh, that Prof. Laycock of that University began to give lectures on the disordered psychology of the insane. In no other university or medical school in Great Britain was any attempt made to give systematic lectures on insanity It was otherwise on the Continent.
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K., A. Sir James Crichton-Browne, F.R.S. Nature 141, 274–275 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141274a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141274a0