This excellent observer': The correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869-75

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Corresponding author:Alison M Pearn , Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge, University Library, West Road, CambridgeCB3 9DR, UK.Email: [email protected]

History of Psychiatry 21(2) 160–175

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DOI: 10.1177/0957154X10363961http://hpy.sagepub.com

‘This excellent observer …’:the correspondence betweenCharles Darwin and JamesCrichton-Browne, 1869–75

Alison M PearnDarwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge

AbstractBetween May 1869 and December 1875, Charles Darwin exchanged more than 40 letters with JamesCrichton-Browne, superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. This papercharts their relationship within the context of Darwin’s wider research networks and methods; it analysesthe contribution that Crichton-Browne made to the writing of Expression, arguing that the informationhe provided materially affected Darwin’s thesis, and that it was partly the need to assimilate this that ledDarwin to publish Expression separately from Descent. The letters help to reconstruct Crichton-Browne’searly research interests, and document Darwin’s little-explored role as a patron. Both men are revealedwithin a collaborative scientific network, with each of them at various times a beneficiary or a promoter.

KeywordsCharles Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution of emotion, Expression of the Emotions, JamesCrichton-Browne, scientific networks, Wakefield Asylum

Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; hereafter citedas Expression ) was an instant sell-out. It is recognized today for its innovative attempts togather and assess objective data (Ekman, 1999: 21), even though it failed to have the immedi-ate impact on the study of psychiatry that a work by such an author on such a subject might

have been expected to achieve. Published as a 400-page monograph in November 1872, it wasoriginally conceived, like so many of Darwin’s books, as something else. As late as June 1870,Darwin was still weighing up whether to include an ‘essay’ on emotion in his book on humanevolution, the two-volume Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (hereafter cited as

Descent ) which went to press in January 1871. 1 Why did Darwin, who had opened his firstnotebook on expression as early as 1838, choose to publish on so significant a subject in theform and at the time that he did – as a separate publication appearing only months after

Descent ? Darwin himself explained that his decision was driven solely by the sheer quantity of material he had accumulated, 2 and it has been suggested that it was a strategy which provided

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Pearn 161

him with a ‘ready made’ riposte to the inevitable criticism of Descent (Browne, 1985a: 309). Aclose reading of his correspondence at the time, however, suggests that some of Darwin’s cru-cial arguments were still being actively formulated in the period between the publication of thetwo books.

Descent was Darwin’s first public application of his theories to human development, and itsmain thrust was an argument for continuity, both physical and mental, between humans and the restof organic nature. A possible counter-argument, of which Darwin was well aware, was the per-ceived uniqueness of the human experience and expression of emotion. Darwin’s response was atwo-pronged attack. He argued that there is no fundamental discontinuity either of form or of func-tion: humans are not alone in experiencing emotion and, in both humans and other animals, theways in which emotions are expressed have their roots in physical reflexes with a demonstrableevolutionary path.

Two arguments were particularly key to Darwin’s strategy: firstly, to counter the claim put for-ward by Charles Bell that certain muscles such as the platysma myoides, referred to by Bell as the

‘muscle of fear’, were specially adapted in humans for the sole expression of emotion ( Expression :10); secondly, Darwin’s concluding chapter on blushing was a riposte to proponents of specialcreation who argued that this was a purely human expression of a moral sense of shame. Much of the detail on which Darwin based both arguments was provided by one correspondent, JamesCrichton-Browne – but only after Descent had been published. 3 So great did Darwin consider hisdebt to Crichton-Browne that, in March 1871 as he was working on the first rough draft of

Expression , he wrote, ‘I have been making immense use almost every day of your MS’; the book‘ought to be called by Darwin & Browne’ ( Corr. 19, Cal. no. 4 8253). Although there is no sugges-tion that either correspondent took this offer seriously, it is nevertheless an extraordinary andrevealing remark.

This paper charts the relationship between Darwin and Crichton-Browne, and describes theirsurviving correspondence, within the context of Darwin’s wider research networks and methods; itanalyses the contribution Crichton-Browne made to the writing of Expression , arguing that theinformation he provided materially affected Darwin’s thesis, and that it may have been the need toassimilate this at so late a stage that prompted Darwin’s decision to hold back Expression and pub-lish it separately from Descent . Finally, it provides a more detailed account than any hithertoattempted of Crichton-Browne’s own career at a crucial stage, and in particular of the establish-ment of his own complex research networks.

This paper relies heavily on primary material in the Cambridge University Library’s DarwinArchive (CUL DAR). Wherever possible I have used the published version of Darwin’s letters in

Burkhardt et al. (eds), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (hereafter Corr. ).5

‘The last of the great Victorians’ 6

James Crichton-Browne (1840–1938) is a difficult figure to place. 7 Honoured by contemporaries,and described as one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the late nineteenth century (Browne,1985b: 153; Gilman, 1979: 253), his appearance in the literature on the history of psychiatry iserratic. 8 Although he left no fewer than seven volumes of personal reflections, he published nomedical monographs; his few academic papers were largely published in the first third of a verylong life, and were preoccupied with the practical issues of classifying, diagnosing and treating

mental disease.Crichton-Browne was born to a Scottish medical dynasty, the son of William Alexander FrancisBrowne and Magdalene Howden Balfour. James adopted the name ‘Crichton’ in honour of the

patrons who had endowed his father’s mental asylum, the Crichton Institute in Dumfries. He







162 History of Psychiatry 21(2)

followed his father into the insane asylum business, becoming Medical Superintendent of the WestRiding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, in August 1867 9 and, in nearly ten years there, establisheda reputation as an energetic pioneer. Wakefield provided a springboard to the prestigious and lucra-tive post of Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy in 1876, a post he held for more than 45 years until

his retirement in 1922. He was a co-founder of the journal Brain in 1878, and a member of theeditorial committee until 1887. He was knighted in 1886.Crichton-Browne’s decade at the West Riding Asylum was his ‘crowning achievement’ (Neve

and Turner, 1995: 404), a formative period in which he forged connections with many of the lead-ing men of his profession, undertook innovative work in asylum administration, and championedthe importance of asylum-based research. Accounts of his life in this period draw on a range of

primary material: the published volumes of the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports , patientrecords, the official reports to the asylum visitors, and occasional references in the local press. Themost thorough study of Crichton-Browne’s life skilfully milks his reminiscences, written in thelate 1920s and 1930s not as a personal history but as homages to the Victorian era, although

the authors acknowledge the obvious pitfalls of using the anecdotal writing of a nonagenarian asevidence for the attitudes, aspirations and day-to-day concerns of his much younger self (Neveand Turner, 1995).

Overlooked, however, has been the potential contribution of a radically different source, theonly known set of Crichton-Browne’s personal papers from this period: a series of letters heexchanged with Charles Darwin between May 1869 and December 1875, precisely his most con-structive years at the West Riding Asylum. The existence of the letters is well known, but they have

been upstaged in the scholarly spotlight by an associated set, or rather sets, of photographs of asy-lum inmates that Crichton-Browne enclosed to Darwin. 10 Apart from some late nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century correspondence with the Macmillans, now in the British Library, these let-

ters appear to be the only collection of Crichton-Browne’s personal papers to survive.

‘[A] sheaf of letters’In one of the longer passages in his published reminiscences, Crichton-Browne copied out his

journal entry for 20 Apr. 1882:

Charles Darwin has passed away, and with him I have lost a friend, illustrious and kind. Recalling mydelightful intercourse with him, I pick out of a sheaf of letters one showing, as indeed they all do, thescrupulous care with which his inquiries were conducted, his marvellous suggestiveness, and his generous

acknowledgment of any help given to him. (Crichton-Browne, 1930: 61)

He went on to give verbatim the entire text of a letter Darwin wrote to him on 18 Apr. 1871(Corr. 19, Cal. no. 7698).

The letter was one of 24 that Darwin is known to have written to Crichton-Browne. The textssurvive not as originals, but as copies made for Darwin’s son, Francis, when he was working on amemorial edition of his father’s letters. 11 Also preserved are 17 letters and sets of manuscript notes,around 40 photographs of Wakefield patients, and three surviving volumes of the West Riding

Asylum Medical Reports sent to Darwin by Crichton-Browne. The corpus is evidently not com- plete: Darwin, as was his practice, cut up two of the letters so that he could file sections in different

portfolios of research notes, and at least one fragment is missing. Also, Crichton-Browne’s lateraccount of his exchange of letters with Darwin implies that there were further letters of his own,sent in response, which no longer exist (Crichton-Browne, 1930: 61–5).







Pearn 163

Many of Crichton-Browne’s letters bear Darwin’s annotations: notes and marginal scoring in pen, pencil, red and blue crayon, all denoting Darwin’s interest in particular passages as he wentover the texts again and again. Some paragraphs are struck through – something Darwin explainedhimself to Crichton-Browne: ‘The single pencil line down the MS. is my mark that I have used it

once’ ( Corr. 19, Cal. no. 7698).The correspondence began in May 1869 and the last known letter is from December 1875, shortly before Crichton-Browne left Wakefield. It falls into three phases of a subtly changing relationship.The bulk of the exchange took place before the end of 1871 and is mainly in the form of questionsfrom Darwin and detailed responses, including lengthy accounts of individual patients, from Crichton-Browne. Most of these letters are concentrated in the period February to April 1871, after the publica-tion of Descent , when Darwin was constructing his first draft of Expression . In 1873 Crichton-Browneinitiated a short exchange seeking Darwin’s support for an ambitious research programme; and in1874, it was again Darwin’s turn to solicit help, this time for his son George Darwin’s research.

‘[T]he insane ought to be studied’Darwin had opened his first notebook on ‘Expression’, marked ‘Private’, in 1838 but he only beganthe overt collection of data on human groups in 1867 when he systematized a series of questionsabout expression and began to send these out to his established correspondents, at first as hand-written lists and then as a printed questionnaire. 12

In the introduction to Expression , Darwin explained that, alongside children and native peoples:‘it occurred to me that the insane ought to be studied, as they are liable to the strongest passions,and give uncontrolled vent to them’. Having identified an area where he needed information,Darwin did what he always did and looked for an expert; he went on to describe the beginning of

his relationship with Crichton-Browne: ‘so I applied to Dr. Maudsley, and received from him anintroduction to Dr. J. Crichton Browne’ ( Expression : 13). This has been mistakenly interpreted tosuggest that Darwin actively sought out Crichton-Browne and, furthermore, has been cited as evi-dence that Crichton-Browne was already a well-known authority by 1869 (Neve and Turner 1995:406). 13 Although strictly factual, the account is, however, misleading. From the letters it is clearthat it was from Henry Maudsley himself that Darwin originally hoped to get information.

Darwin had been reading the second edition of Maudsley’s highly influential work, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (Maudsley, 1868). 14 His interest was not in Maudsley’s discus-sions of the causes of insanity or in the classification or taxonomy of mental disease, or in itsdiagnosis or treatment (those sections he left unannotated). He was, however, interested in

Maudsley’s discussion of the operation of the nervous system in producing reflex actions that, toDarwin, helped place humans in a continuum with other living beings, even plants: ‘Drosera’ [sun-dews], he wrote triumphantly in the margin by an account of the sensitivity of the skin of a decapi-tated frog. He would also have been attracted by Maudsley’s advocacy of observation and inductionas the basis of understanding. In particular Darwin scored a passage on emotion:

The beatings of the heart, the movements of respiration, the expressions of the countenance, the pallor of fear, or the flush of anger […], all these evince with certainty that the organic life participates essentiallyin the manifestation of emotion. Before definite paths of association of ideas, and groups of ideas, have

been organised through culture and experience, every emotion tends to react directly outwards […] In

children and savages simple emotions are […] readily manifested in outward display; it is only when astrong character has been fashioned that the power exists to retain the emotional energy within the sphereof the intellectual life. (Maudsley 1868: 158–9)









As far as the insane are concerned, Maudsley continued: ‘the less the culture, the more general arethe visible effects of emotion or passion: in the idiot an explosion of passion is sometimes an explo-sion of convulsions’ (Maudsley, 1868: 160). Here was the man Darwin wanted. The two men mayhave known one another through Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s brother and Maudsley’s neighbour in

Queen Anne Street, London; Darwin lost little time in writing to Maudsley. That letter does notsurvive, 15 but we know from Maudsley’s reply that it was dated 7 Feb. When Maudsley eventuallyreplied on 20 May, it was not to give his own answers, however, but to pass on those he had in turnsolicited from Crichton-Browne: ‘As my present opportunities did not admit of my giving yousatisfactory information […] I sent the letter to my friend Dr C. Browne […] whose acquirementsare of a high order’ ( Corr . 17, letter from Maudsley, 20 May 1869).

From the evidence of Crichton-Browne’s first letter, it is clear that Darwin had enclosed a copyof his printed ‘expression’ questionnaire with his letter to Maudsley and had asked two supplemen-tary questions specifically with regard to the insane. From Crichton-Browne’s answer and fromDarwin’s account of the correspondence in Expression , it can be deduced that the questions were

firstly whether extreme fear induced erection of the hair, and secondly whether ‘retraction of thelips and uncovering of the teeth […] as if to bite the offender’ was common during paroxysms of rage ( Corr . 17, enclosure to letter from Maudsley, 20 May 1869, and n.2).

Crichton-Browne supplied observations on the questions of bristling of the hair and baring of the teeth, each supported by details of the cases of five patients, two being further illustrated with

photographs; one patient is shown in Figure 1, and see also Figure 2. These notes Crichton-Brownedescribed as ‘exceedingly crude’, explaining that, being unsure whether Darwin required statistics,generalizations, or something else entirely, he had decided finally to ‘stick to facts’. No responsecould have been better calculated to endear Crichton-Browne to Darwin who was himself con-stantly in the business of accumulating and ‘marshalling’ facts. The intensity of his interest in the

content of the letter is demonstrated by copious underlining and marginal scoring. At several pointshe was moved to write ‘vy good’. Now he had really found his man.Having found his ‘excellent observer’, Darwin relied for queries relating to the insane almost

entirely on Crichton-Browne’s testimony and advice. He continued to consult his existing medicalcorrespondents such as James Paget and William Bowman on some of the same questions, andcited published sources, including Maudsley, but clearly felt that in Crichton-Browne he had iden-tified a reliable witness, one who trusted, as Darwin did himself, first-hand and immediate observa-tion rather than memory; it was unnecessary to look for corroboration or additional sources of information. By the time that Darwin came to write to Maudsley, this method of gathering informa-tion by writing, often unintroduced, to leading practitioners in any field that interested him was a

highly effective one. He had become skilfully charming as he made often heavy and repeateddemands. A useful reply on one point generally earned the writer yet another list of queries.Once he had established a relationship with a trusted source, Darwin was ingenious in putting

them to creative use, and as new areas of enquiry opened up, he would resort first to tapping hisexisting contacts. After Expression was published, when Darwin was looking for information on anew research interest, he explained to Crichton-Browne that he intended first to consult thosewhose ‘former obliging conduct’ in providing information for Expression made him hopeful theywould be willing to help again (DCP, Cal. no. 9227, letter to J Crichton-Browne [hereafter JCB], 5Jan. 1874).

Where existing correspondents were unable themselves to provide answers to new questions,

they often became the nodes through which Darwin tapped into new networks. Crichton-Brownewas no exception; by the time Expression was published, he was an established member of Darwin’snetwork of collaborators. In 1874, when Darwin’s son George began actively researching the con-sequences of cousin-marriage, Darwin wrote to Crichton-Browne, asking him not only to gather







Pearn 165

Figure 1. Crichton-Browne sent Darwin this photograph of a West Riding Asylum patient in May 1869with his first letter (CUL DAR 161: 323/6v).Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library









data on his own patients, but also to suggest other ‘energetic and obliging doctors’ to whom hewould be willing to provide an introduction ( Ibid .). Surviving letters confirm that Crichton-Brownemade just such introductions (CUL DAR 97: C74, letter from George Darwin to Dr Rayner; DCPCal. no. 9299a, letter from Darwin to G. E. Shuttleworth, 17 Feb. [1874]).

‘Almost every sentence is of use, and I shall quote considerableportions’ 16

Darwin cited information from Crichton-Browne’s first letter no fewer than 10 times in Expression ,referring to all but one of the case studies, several of them verbatim. Although it was obvious thatCrichton-Browne was both ill and overworked, Darwin followed up his original request, asking forspecific observations on his three major bugbears: blushing, the action of the platysma myoides,and the ‘grief muscles’. Over the next two years, he not only asked Crichton-Browne to provideinformation from existing research notes, but initiated a series of observations and experimentswhich were carried out on his behalf. As late as November 1871, Darwin asked Crichton-Browneto observe whether the platysma myoides contracted during shivering fits ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 8047).

In part, the value of the case studies used in Expression was to provide a sense of authorityunderpinning Darwin’s argument. He was conscious that in attempting to provide a taxonomy of expression, he was on difficult and uncertain ground. ‘Facts’ and plenty of them were exactly what

Figure 2. An extract from Crichton-Browne’s 1869 ‘Notes on the Expressions of Emotions amongst theinsane and the chaotic’ sent with photographs, including that shown in Figure 1 (source: as in Fig. 1)The description reads: ‘[…] She is always excited & violent, & noisy; but passes through various stages of exacerbation& mitigation, the state of her hair being a sure & convenient criterion, of her mental condition. […] The photograph wastaken when it was in its most tractable humour.’








Pearn 167

he needed. Crichton-Browne provided, for example, crucial evidence that human hair, like the furof mammals or the feathers of birds, could become erect under the influence of fear or anger. Darwinwrote that before receiving Crichton-Browne’s answer to his query about hair ‘standing on end’ hehad wondered if the phrase was not ‘mere poetic licence’ ( Corr . 17, letter to JCB, 22 May 1869).

In the introduction to Expression , however, Darwin went beyond even his usual scrupulousacknowledgment of assistance to suggest that his reliance on Crichton-Browne was exceptional.Darwin recognized that Crichton-Browne had done more than just provide authoritative window-dressing, but had materially assisted in the construction of the argument, and saved Darwin fromerrors made through lack of medical knowledge. In asking about uncontrolled weeping and laugh-ter in the insane, Darwin’s object had been to establish that this was due to a lack of restraint in thismore ‘natural’ state; he modified his argument however, in light of information from Crichton-Browne that euphoria and weeping were both well-known symptoms of brain damage: ‘I did notmake enough or any allowance for mere senseless laughter and weeping’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7499;

Expression : 155–6).

Darwin relied on Crichton-Browne particularly heavily in his argument about blushing. In April1871 Darwin asked Crichton-Browne to review a short essay on an apparent relationship between blushing and ‘confusion of mind’, continuing ‘I should not think of publishing this, without someable medical man looking it over. It is founded chiefly on what you have told me’ ( Corr . 19, Cal.no. 7672). The manuscript does not survive, but it seems that Darwin may have believed that blush-ing would act directly on the operation of the brain by drawing off its blood supply ( Expression :324). Having received Crichton-Browne’s comments, Darwin was forced to revise his ideas: ‘I willcorrect my little discussion and give some of your evidence on the connection between the circula-tion of the brain and skin’, admitting that this was an aspect he had quite overlooked ( Corr . 19, Cal.no. 7698). Crichton-Browne (1930: 65) in his account of the correspondence says:

I explained to Darwin that the case which I described to him […] in which in a woman, under medicalexamination, blushing, at first confined to the face and ears, immediately spread over the neck and breastwhen the chest was exposed – was illustrative of the rapid extension, under increased emotional perturba-tion, of the vaso-motor paralysis in which blushing really consists […]. Blushing can neither be inducednor checked by any effort of the will.

In April Crichton-Browne reported that ‘various experiments’ on his patients had failed to producea genuine blush ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7658).

Not everything that Crichton-Browne supplied was used; for example, Darwin was fascinated

by a graphic account of a phantom pregnancy but keenly aware that what might be acceptablematerial in a medical paper would need careful handling in a popular book – ‘perhaps I may giveit wrapped up’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7666) – and the details of the case were omitted in Expression .

‘Many thanks for the dreadful photo of the imbeciles’ 17 With his very first letter to Darwin, Crichton-Browne enclosed two photographs of patients: one toillustrate bristling hair, and the other of a man who ‘died of horror’. Around 40 photographs of asylum patients sent by Crichton-Browne still survive in the Darwin Archive, but the correspon-dence reveals that the two men had very different attitudes to their significance and uses, with

Darwin increasingly disillusioned with their potential for his own purposes.18

In the end, none of the photographs sent by Crichton-Browne was reproduced in Expression , although one was usedas the basis of an engraving.








Darwin had already been wrestling with the difficulty of capturing fleeting expression accu-rately, both in descriptions and in photographs, and also with the issue of whether expression could

be accurately simulated. In his reply to Crichton-Browne’s first letter, Darwin enclosed his own photo graph of a young girl with contracted ‘grief muscles’ which he had been circulating with his

‘expression’ questionnaire ( Corr . 17, letter to JCB, 22 May 1869, and n.10).19

He also described anexperiment to establish the accuracy of photographs purporting to record particular emotions.These were a series of large plates accompanying Duchenne’s Mécanisme de la physionomiehumaine (1862). Duchenne had identified particular combinations of muscles responsible for the

production of particular expressions, and believed that it was possible accurately to simulate thoseexpressions through the application of electrical currents. Darwin had shown a selection of Duchenne’s plates to a series of visitors to Down House and recorded their reactions, and ‘whereall or nearly all agree in their answer’ was prepared to accept the plate as a valid representation(Corr . 18, letter to JCB, 8 June [1870]; and CUL DAR 186: 27–29). Darwin sent his copy of Duchenne to Crichton-Browne together with the plates so that he could also assess the accuracy of

the portrayals.20

By late 1873 Darwin was articulating his doubts about the ability of photography to portrayfleeting emotion accurately: ‘I believe it is quite necessary to study the previous appearance of thecountenance, its changes, however small, and the living eyes, in order to form any safe judgement’(DCP, Cal. no. 9193, to JCB, 30 Dec. 1873), and he wrote dismissively on one packet of photo-graphs ‘Idiots of no use’ (CUL DAR 53.1: C26).

Crichton-Browne, following the pioneering work of Hugh Diamond, was using photography inthe recording and diagnosis of mental illness and referred to a private album from which some of his prints were taken. Most are annotated in his hand with diagnoses such as ‘melancholia’, ‘mania’or ‘moral insanity’. He published photographs with two of his papers in West Riding Asylum

Medical Reports, though their purpose appears to have been more decorative than instructional.Both the photographs themselves and references in the letters suggest a growing technical sophis-tication; some of the photographs were taken by a local photographer, G & J Hall of 26 Westgate,Wakefield, but the Wakefield Asylum, which had its own farm, laundry and brewery, also had itsown photographic studio, certainly by 1873 and possibly as early as 1870, and most of the

photographs are mounted on cards printed on the reverse: ‘West Riding Asylum PhotographicStudio Wakefield’. 21

‘I value your approbation more than that of any one else now living’ 22

Although Maudsley had politely excused himself on the grounds of insufficient opportunity tomake observations, his reaction to Darwin’s request for assistance – which could uncharitably bedescribed as ‘passing the buck’ – is in sharp contrast to Crichton-Browne’s immediate, extreme andsustained eagerness to assist. The explanation must lie partly in the different stages each hadreached in their careers, and the difference in relative value that Darwin’s patronage held for them.Although only five years older than Crichton-Browne, Maudsley was the unquestioned leader inthe emergent field of psychiatry. He had been co-editor of the Journal of Mental Science since1863, was lecturer on insanity at St Mary’s Hospital, London, and was already a consultant to roy-alty (Collie, 1988; ODNB: sv Maudsley, Henry). Crichton-Browne, although well connected andclearly a rising star – he would not otherwise have been appointed Superintendent at Wakefield –

had as yet published very little. The publication of the first volume of the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports was still three years away, and he may have calculated that he could not afford toturn down an opportunity for patronage that his more firmly established friend no longer needed.







Pearn 169

Published studies have served to place Crichton-Browne’s long career in the context of the historyof medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular his synthesis of neurologyand psychiatry, and his later work in nutrition and paediatrics (see: Browne, 1985b; Jellinek, 2005;

Neve and Turner, 1995, Oppenheim, 1991). They have also suggested that there was a significant

shift in focus, from active medical researcher to policy-maker and essayist, when he moved fromWakefield to the Visitorship in Lunacy (Neve and Turner, 1995: 402). However, Crichton-Browne’sreputation, both to contemporaries and to history, rests largely on his achievement in establishingthe West Riding Asylum Medical Reports . He contributed at least one article himself to each of thesix volumes that appeared annually, the last one in 1876 by which time he had already leftWakefield. Brain , founded just two years later, was a more ambitious successor.

The first volume of Reports appeared several months before Expression , so there is no easilydemonstrable or simple link between Darwin’s public acknowledgment of Crichton-Browne’s col-laboration in Expression and Crichton-Browne’s career trajectory. Darwin encouraged Crichton-Browne to publish his own results, however, writing: ‘Anything which I may publish from you

would not, however, interfere with any more elaborate papers by yourself’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7698).At the end of 1873, Crichton-Browne, with three volumes of the Reports behind him, wrote toDarwin outlining an ambitious co-ordinated research programme on various aspects of ‘GeneralParalysis’:

I have induced a number of able and distinguished friends to undertake its investigation in differentaspects […] and the monographs thus produced, will I believe when collected together form a completenatural history of the disease and greatly elucidate its causes, course and treatment. (DCP, Cal. no. 9190,letter from JCB, 27 Dec. 1873)

He went on to solicit Darwin’s active support: ‘You might immensely aid us in our work if youwould consent to give us a very few remarks on the Physiognomy of the Disease’. Darwin repliedwith a characteristic mix of charm, humility, and elusiveness:

I should be a very ungrateful man if I did not comply to the utmost of my power with any wish of yours.Therefore I will do my best […]. But I really think it will be impossible for me to write even a short essayon the subject […]. From your various letters to me, I am fully convinced that you could do well thatwhich I could effect only in the most imperfect manner. (original emphasis)

Darwin suggested that he would comment on a set of photographs of patients, but was careful not

to promise a piece for publication (DCP Cal. no. 9193, letter to JCB, 30 Dec. 1873).Behind the scenes, however, Darwin was active in promoting Crichton-Browne’s career. Amongthe papers in the Darwin Archive, there is a draft of a letter of reference for ‘C. Brown’ (Darwin’sspelling of personal names was often erratic). It is dated only 29 Dec., but it is written on the reverseof notes for the second edition of Descent , published in 1874, which include a reference to an 1873

paper. Darwin began correcting Descent in November 1873 but did not finish it until the spring of 1874. The draft has some phrases in common with the letter of 30 Dec. 1873, and is likely to dateeither to 1873 or 1874. It concludes: ‘With very best wishes that you may obtain the appointmentwhich you desire’; the appointment is unspecified but the letter begins: ‘I do not k[now] enough of

N[eurology] & pathology to speak with respect to these subjects’ and continues to state Darwin’s

high opinion of Crichton-Browne’s abilities. Given the likely date, it is possible that Crichton-Browne sought Darwin’s support specifically to help him obtain the post of Visitor in Lunacy, or hemay simply have asked for an open letter that he could use in support of any application.








Darwin remained active on Crichton-Browne’s behalf. One of his last public acts was to proposeCrichton-Browne for Fellowship of the Royal Society; the election was confirmed in 1883, afterDarwin’s death.

‘One of the hardest worked men in her Majesty’s Dominions’ 23

Before the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports appeared, there are few clues to Crichton-Browne’sresearch interests. Apart from an 1860 paper on ‘Psychical diseases of early life’, he appears tohave published little; the papers in mainstream journals that are cited as evidence for his activitiesat Wakefield also only begin to appear in 1871 (see Neve and Turner, 1995: 408). In the context of Darwin’s wider correspondence, the letters exchanged with Crichton-Browne provide a morefinely grained account of the early Wakefield years than otherwise accessible.

From Crichton-Browne’s initial response to Darwin’s queries, it is evident that he had alreadyestablished at least a rudimentary research programme by 1869. In his second letter he assured

Darwin that though his ‘numerous & harassing duties’ left him little leisure to ‘collect and utilizethe mass of interesting material which is as it were going to waste around me in this huge hospitalfor want of accurate observation’, his limited opportunities were nevertheless ‘diligently employed’.‘The fruits of my researches’, he continued, ‘are very much at your service’ ( Corr . 17, letter fromJCB, 1 June 1869). Although he did later undertake specific observations, and even experiments,on Darwin’s behalf, Crichton-Browne could answer his original questions by drawing on existingrecords of his own. For example, he gave a vivid description of the delusions suffered by a 35-year-old woman, Grace Mellor, during attacks of ‘intense fear & neuralgia’, including details of her hairstanding on end, the extensive flushing of her skin, and the effects on her eyes, and on the musclesof her face and neck. He said this came from his own notebook, and in a later letter Crichton-

Browne referred to having observations on blushing scattered through many notebooks.Although Crichton-Browne occasionally mentioned information from the official case-bookskept under the terms of the Lunacy Act of 1844, and even pasted a cutting from a printed report of ‘Deaths’ and ‘Recoveries’ to his first letter, in most cases he appears to have cited notes he wasmaking for his own purposes. In answering one of Darwin’s queries about muscle action Crichton-Browne referred to a comment by one of his assistants about violent contraction of the platysmamyoides, made despite ‘knowing nothing of my researches’ ( Corr . 18, letter from JCB, 15 Mar.1870; see also letter from JCB, 16 Feb. 1871).

Crichton-Browne’s aim was to collate information, looking for patterns of symptoms that couldaid in the diagnosis, and ultimately in the treatment, of mental illnesses. 24 He was particularly

interested in the physical organ of the brain, believing that mental illness generally had physicalcauses, and in the nervous system and blood circulation. He introduced autopsies at the Asylum asstandard practice.

Doubt has been cast on Crichton-Browne’s later claim that he left Wakefield primarily for healthreasons; a more likely motivation perhaps being ‘the lure of a wider fame and better remuneration’(Neve and Turner, 1995: 404). However, Crichton-Browne’s contemporary account of his dailylife, given in letters to Darwin, lends some credence to his claim. Crichton-Browne was 26 whenhe became an asylum superintendent and responsible for the care of more than one thousandinmates and the management of a community the size and complexity of a large village. He mayhave been a little younger than most newly appointed asylum superintendents but not dramatically

so, and many moved on after no longer a period than he did.25

It was a young man’s occupation;three successive superintendents of the Sussex Asylum ended their careers with long periods of sick leave (Gardner, 1999: 237). The overriding refrain of Crichton-Browne’s letters was overwork,







Pearn 171

anxiety, and ill-health. He described a typical day as ‘ toil’ (his emphasis) from 8.00am to 11.00pmin a ‘house of bondage’. He suffered from persistent headaches. A hiatus in correspondence of several months was excused partly on the grounds of a protracted and serious, but unspecified, ill-ness, and as early as 1871 he complained that ‘the exigencies of the public service’, having already

ruined his health, ‘now threaten to shorten my life’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7484). It was an unsustain-able pace. Even Darwin was forced to concede on this score: ‘my health affects only comfort, andis not otherwise serious, which I fear from what you say is far from your case’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7499).

Like his father, Crichton-Browne was a campaigner for the humane treatment of the insane,with minimal restraint, but his letters, although they suggest scrupulous standards of care, reveallittle empathy with his patients. To him the asylum was a vast reserve of potential research mate-rial. He was no distant administrator – he described distressing personal encounters with patients –

but his tone, at least in correspondence with Darwin, remained detached. It is hard not to feelsympathy for the ‘emaciated old men’ in whom Crichton-Browne reported rather dejectedly that hecould detect no emotion associated with the twitching of the platysma ‘other than annoyance at my

interference & observation’ ( Corr . 18, letter from JCB, 15 Mar. 1870).

‘I owe also, to the kindness of Mr. Patrick Nicol, of the Sussex LunaticAsylum, interesting statements on two or three points’ 26 When he wrote to Crichton-Browne early in 1874 asking for his help on George Darwin’s behalf,one of the doctors Darwin intended to contact again was Patrick Nicol who had helped him on

Expression : ‘If I knew the address of Dr Nichol [ sic ](who helped me on ‘Expression’) I wouldwrite to him too’. Nicol’s part in Darwin’s correspondence is evidence for Crichton-Browne’s earlyrole in the fostering of an increasingly formalized network of asylum practitioners and other med-

ics and his creation of what was in effect a distributed research group. Nicol is an overlooked figure: he is the only asylum practitioner other than Crichton-Brownecited in Expression for first-hand information, and the only other one with whom Darwin seems tohave had any correspondence. Far from being a second independent authority, however, heemerges in the wider context of the correspondence between Darwin and Crichton-Browne as anearly protégé of Crichton-Browne, and a member of what has been described as Crichton-Browne’s‘medical intelligentsia’ (Bynum, 1985: 96; Neve and Turner, 1995). The term is used for the tal-ented group of young doctors – of which Crichton-Browne was the undoubted catalyst – who

published in The West Riding Asylum Medical Reports . It included John Hughlings Jackson,Clifford Allbutt, David Ferrier and Thomas Lauder Brunton; they were all named as potential

contributors to Crichton-Browne’s 1873 research programme on ‘General Paralysis’ and all butJackson later received knighthoods for their services to medicine. Crichton-Browne was a giftedtalent-spotter.

Nicol’s career is hard to trace. By the time Darwin enquired after his address in January 1874 hewas already dead at the age of only 26. He was another Scottish-born physician, trained at Aberdeen,who at the time when he was in contact with Darwin in March 1870 was serving a brief stint asassistant medical officer at the Sussex Lunatic Asylum, Haywards Heath (Gardner, 1999). Nicolwas the author of two articles (Nicol, 1871, 1872) in West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports ,where he is identified as a former clinical assistant at Wakefield.

The appointment of clinical assistants is one of the administrative innovations for which

Crichton-Browne is renowned. In 1866 he outlined a proposal for what amount to unpaid intern-ships, and the scheme was apparently running by 1868 (Neve and Turner, 1995); carefully chosenyoung men were to serve for a period as general medical and research assistants in return for board








and lodging. Patrick Nicol must have been one of the first, and his subsequent career suggests thatCrichton-Browne was an active mentor.

Nicol provided Darwin with a sheaf of foolscap case notes, similar in style and content to thosesent by Crichton-Browne ( Corr . 18, letter from Patrick Nicol, 13 May 1870). The sheets are headed

‘Sussex Lunatic Asylum’ and dated 13 May 1870. There is no salutation or valediction andno covering letter survives. Darwin wrote on the notes ‘(Mr Patrick Nicol) at the request of Dr Lockhart Robertson’. Lockhart Robertson resigned as superintendent of the Sussex Asylumearly in 1870 on his appointment as a Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy – an office in which Crichton-Browne was to join him only five years later. There is no evidence that Lockhart Robertson had anyother contact with Darwin, but he was well known to Crichton-Browne. It is hard to escape theinference that Nicol secured the post in Sussex through Crichton-Browne’s patronage, and that hisintroduction to Darwin was also mediated through Crichton-Browne.

The notes Nicol sent to Darwin related to the contraction of the platysma myoides under the influ-ence of fear, and to facial expression in those suffering from melancholia. He made specific reference

to Darwin’s ‘expression’ questionnaire and gave brief answers to question five (‘When in low spirits,are the corners of the mouth depressed, and the inner corner of the eyebrows raised by that musclewhich the French call the ‘Grief muscle’?’) and question seven (‘When a man sneers or snarls atanother, is the corner of the upper lip over the canine or eye tooth raised on the side facing the manwhom he addresses?’). In using Nicol’s notes, Darwin analysed them together with several sets of notes from Crichton-Browne, marking Crichton-Browne’s with the letters A to D, and Nicol’s withan E, and then constructing a single classified index to all the sheets, according to the subjects thatinterested him – ‘pyramidalis nasi’, ‘blushing’, ‘erection of hair’, and so on (CUL DAR 161: 322).

One of the cases Nicol described to Darwin was ‘lately a patient in the West Riding Asylum’;also, from Nicol’s published papers in West Riding Asylum Medical Reports which rely heavily on

long excerpts from case notes, it is apparent that he continued to have access to Wakefield recordsafter leaving Sussex – dismissed for insulting Lockhart Robertson’s successor – and moving backnorth to Bradford Infirmary. Bradford may well have been a deliberate choice for its proximity toWakefield.

ConclusionThe letters that he exchanged with Darwin give the young Crichton-Browne a voice that wouldotherwise be lost; they allow us to plot the course of his career at Wakefield, reconstructing someof his early research interests, to chart Darwin’s role in his career, and of Crichton-Browne’s own

role in relation to others. The letters highlight Darwin’s role as a patron, an aspect of his contribu-tion to science that has rarely been discussed in any detail, and reveal some of the ways in which both men were able to construct complex networks of support and influence.

It is clear from their correspondence that the two men had radically different agendas in theirapproach to the insane, yet Darwin was able to adapt the information originally gathered byCrichton-Browne as an aid in diagnosis, to support his argument about the evolutionary relation-ship of humans to other animals. There is some evidence that Crichton-Browne contributed to thedevelopment of crucial elements of Darwin’s argument, and that Darwin was still wrestling withthat argument after Descent had gone to press. Both men are revealed within a collaborative scien-tific network, with each of them at various times and in various conjunctions a beneficiary or a

promoter. Darwin summed up the fine balance of their relationship when he wrote: ‘When I thinkof all the trouble I have caused you, my sole excuse is that I hope I may thus give the public somescraps of your knowledge.’ ( Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7698).








Pearn 173

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the John Templeton Foundation, and the Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil MOU0957520. My principal debt is to my colleagues past and present on the Darwin Correspondence

Project, without whose work this paper would not be possible; I am particularly grateful to Shelley Innes andJim Secord for comments on an early draft. I also thank Katy Tabb for early access to her unpublished MPhilthesis and useful discussions, and also the editors, Pieter Adriaens and Andreas De Block, for patience, per-sistence and a very real contribution to the final version: this paper ‘ought to be called “by Pearn, Adriaensand De Block”’, though faults that remain are entirely my own.

Notes1 See Correspondence (hereafter Corr .) 18, letter to F. C. Donders, 21 June 1870.2 See, for example: Descent : 5; Corr . 18, letter to JCB, 8 June [1870], and letter to F. C. Donders, 21 June 1870.3 Darwin did not cite Crichton-Browne at all in Descent .

4 Calendar number: see Note 5.5 I am grateful to my colleagues on the Darwin Correspondence Project for access to unpublished transcripts.For letters currently being edited for Vol. 19 (1871) of the Correspondence , I have also included theProject’s ‘Calendar number’ (Cal. no.) as a further aid to finding a letter. Calendar numbers can befound listed at the front of each published volume, and are also used as letter identifiers on the Project’swebsite (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/, cited here as ‘DCP’) where details of all known letters are to

be found, including the provenance of the original. For manuscript material that will not be published inthe Correspondence I have given the full provenance of the original.

6 Easterbrook, 1938/2004.7 For biographical information, see: Browne, 1985b; Jellinek, 2005; Neve and Turner, 1995; ODNB (sv

Browne, Sir James Crichton); Oppenheim, 1991.

8 In Shorter (1997: 350), for example, Crichton-Browne is mentioned only in a footnote as the author of reminiscences on John Connolly.9 For the date, see Report of the Committee of Visitors …, 1867 : 13.

10 For discussions of Crichton-Browne’s photographs, see: Prodger, 1999, 2009; Tabb, 2007.11 Francis Darwin asked as many of his father’s correspondents as he could trace to send in collections

of letters: some he was able to keep but many he had copied, returning the originals to their owners.Presumably this is what happened in this case. The copies can be relied on as trustworthy texts: Francisreviewed and corrected many of the transcriptions, including those of the letters to Crichton-Browne.

12 For a brief account of the ‘expression’ questionnaire and its history, see Corr . 15, Appendix IV.13 Despite the fact that Darwin had known Crichton-Browne’s father at Edinburgh (Tabb, 2007; Walmsley,

1993), there is no evidence that he was aware of the connection. William Browne is not mentioned in

the correspondence despite the fact that he wrote one of the articles in the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports which Crichton-Browne is known to have sent to Darwin (Browne, 1872). Nor was he mentionedwhen in March 1870 Crichton-Browne excused his failure to write to Darwin partly on the grounds of ‘two family afflictions of a most distressing character’, referring to the death of his younger brother inFebruary, and probably to the carriage accident that left William Browne suddenly blind ( Corr . 18, letterfrom JCB, 15 Mar. 1870, and n.1).

14 On Maudsley, see Collie, 1988. Darwin’s copy of Maudsley (1868) is in the Darwin Archive at CambridgeUniversity Library. In a note dated 2 Feb. 1869 Darwin wrote: ‘After reading Maudsley I think instinctsare not connected with intellectual power, but these are generally superadded & necessarily destroythe perfection of instincts […] instincts are lost at the expense of the gain of high intellectual powersexcepting a few necessary instincts’ (CUL DAR 80: B101). Darwin cited Maudsley (1868) in Descent ,

and Maudsley (1870) in Expression .15 Maudsley deliberately destroyed all his personal papers, and even unsold copies of his published work, at

the end of his life; see Collie, 1988: xii.









16 Corr . 19, Cal. no. 7478.17 Corr . 19, Cal no. 7698.18 Gilman (1979) argues that Darwin’s correspondence with Crichton-Browne was largely motivated by

interest in the photographs, which later waned; Tabb (2007: 34) modifies this argument to suggest thatDarwin’s interest had never been in ‘the etiology of expression among the mentally ill except in so far asit was revelatory of broader evolutionary trends’.

19 The girl was possibly Darwin’s daughter Henrietta; Darwin made a note that ‘Etty in acting on grief muscles makes splendid grief folds’ (CUL DAR 195.4: 22).

20 Crichton-Browne eventually sent several pages of critical analysis ( Corr. 18, letter from JCB [6 June1870]), but his failure to return the book for nearly a year induced high levels of anxiety in Darwin, whorequested its return in a polite but increasingly panic-stricken series of letters.

21 There are two versions of the Asylum’s printed address on the surviving photographs. In a letter to Darwinof 6 June 1870, Crichton-Browne reported: ‘we are beginning to take large photographs here, the size of Duchenne’s’ ( Corr . 18, letter from JCB, 6 June 1870); and on 16 Apr. 1873: ‘The photographs […] arerough and poor for the most part having been executed in our private Studio under difficult circumstances’(DCP Cal. no. 8861). Crichton-Browne has been credited with being himself the photographer (Browne,1985a; Gilman, 1979), and it is possible he was one of them, although there is nothing in his letters toDarwin to confirm this. He credited ‘Mr George Bracey’ with taking the photographs used to illustrateone of his papers in The West Riding Asylum Medical Reports .

22 Corr . 19, letter from JCB 16 Feb. 1871.23 Corr . 18, letter from JCB, 6 June 1870.24 Crichton-Browne appears to have identified, as a coherent group, the same set of symptoms identified 30

years later as Alzheimer’s syndrome; Snyder and Pearn, 2007.25 Hugh Welch Diamond became superintendent of Surrey Asylum at the age of 29 and left at 37; Robert

Boyd 31 and 50, respectively; William Hicks 31 and 50; John Bucknill 27 and 45; John Langdon 30 and40; William M’Intosh was appointed at 25 ( ODNB ).

26 Expression : 14.

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Documents

This excellent observer': The correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869-75