John Brown (doctor)

John Brown
Depiction of a brawl between Brunonian and anti-Brunonian students.

John Brown (1735 – 17 October 1788) was a Scottish physician and the creator of the Brunonian system of medicine.

John Brown, as depicted by the Edinburgh artist John Kay.

Biography

Brown was born in Berwickshire and after attending the parish school at Duns, he moved to Edinburgh and enrolled in divinity classes at the University of Edinburgh and worked part-time as a private tutor. In 1759 he discontinued his theological studies and began the study of medicine and became the private tutor for the family of the leading Edinburgh physician William Cullen. After a dispute with Cullen and the professors of the university, Brown's public lectures contained attacks on preceding systems of medicine, including Cullen's. He received his medical degree from St Andrews in 1779.

In 1780 he published his Elementa Medicinae (Elements of Medicine in its English version), which for a time was an influential text. It set out his theories, often called the Brunonian system of medicine, which essentially understood all diseases as a matter of over or under-stimulation. He wrote that "all life consists in stimulus, and both over-abundance and deficiency is productive of diseases."[1]

His medical ideas proved highly influential for the next few decades, especially in Italy and Germany.[2] Jacob Friedrich Ludwig Lentin’s Medizinische Bemerkungen auf ein literarischen Reise durch Deutschland (1800) talked about German medicine being dominated by the struggles of Brunonians and "anti-Brunonian terrorists."[3] There are also reports of 400 students rioting in a dispute between the two sides in the German university city of Göttingen in 1802.[4] By 1817, however, the German historian of medicine Kurt Sprengel suggested that Brunonian medicine "has very few supporters."[5]

In 1786 Brown went to London to improve his fortunes but died of apoplexy two years later, on 17 October 1788.

In 1789 a Cambridge undergraduate called William Margaretson Heald published The Brunoniad, a mock epic poem about Brown, mocking his consumption of alcohol and opium and referring to a bar brawl in Dunn's Hotel in Edinburgh's New Town.[6]

Legacy

In 1795 a critical edition of Brown's Elements of Medicine was published by the well-known physician Thomas Beddoes for the benefit of Brown's widow and children.[7] An edition of Brown's works, with a biography by his son, William Cullen Brown, appeared in 1804.

Brown was the grandfather of the artist Ford Madox Brown and the great-great grandfather of the novelist Ford Madox Ford.

Notes

  1. ↑ Brown, John (1814). Elements of Medicine. Philadelphia. p. 19.
  2. ↑ Bynum, W. F.; Porter, Roy (1988). Brunonianism in Britain and Europe. Wellcome Trust.
  3. ↑ Lentin, Jacob Friedrich Ludwig (1800). Medizinische Bemerkungen auf ein literarischen Reise durch Deutschland. Berlin. p. 63.
  4. ↑ Niewoehner-Desbordes, Ulrich (1994). "Der Brownianismus und die Göttinger Unruhen 1802 oder ein Scharlachstreit". Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen.
  5. ↑ Sprengel, Kurt (1817). Critical Review of the State of Medicine during the Last Ten Years. Edinburgh: George Ramsay. p. 14.
  6. ↑ Heald, William Margaretson (1789). The Brunoniad: An Heroic Poem in Six Cantos. London: G. Kearnsley.
  7. ↑ Staff (January 1811) "Stock's Life of Beddoes" The Medical and Physical Journal 25: pp. 172–175; 259–264; 342–348, p. 263

References

Further reading

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Brown, John (Scottish physician 1735-1788).
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/21/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.