He was one of Charles Darwin's leading collaborators – on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – and, like Duchenne de Boulogne (at the Salpêtrière in Paris) and Hugh Welch Diamond in Surrey, was a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography.

Throughout his career, Crichton-Browne emphasised the asymmetrical aspects of the human brain and behaviour; and also, like Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer, made some influential predictions about the neurological changes associated with severe psychiatric disorders.

Crichton-Browne's father, the asylum reformer William A. F. Browne (1805–1885), was a prominent phrenologist[6][7] and his younger brother, John Hutton Balfour-Browne KC (1845–1921), wrote a classic account of the legal relations of insanity.

[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] William A. F. Browne was a pioneering Victorian psychiatrist and an exponent of moral treatment[17][18][19] with an interest in the psychological lives of his patients as illustrated by their group activities, dreams and art-works.

Shortly before his death, Crichton-Browne wrote a valuable account of his Dumfries childhood, including the visit of the American asylum reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix.

Among his teachers was his father's friend Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) whose magnum opus Mind and Brain[22] is an extended speculative essay on neurology and psychological life.

In 1872, Crichton-Browne developed his father's phrenological theories by inviting the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier (1843–1928) to direct the asylum laboratories and to conduct studies on the cortical localization of cerebral functions.

[36][37][38][39][40] The bulk of the correspondence occurred during the preparation of Crichton-Browne's famous West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports and of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin's mysterious symptoms which included vomiting, sweating, sighing, and weeping, particularly troublesome in the early months of 1872, seem to have improved around the time that he completed his work on the emotions.

Recalling my delightful intercourse with him, I pick out of a sheaf of letters one showing, as indeed they all do, the scrupulous care with which his inquiries were conducted, his marvellous suggestiveness, and his generous acknowledgement of any help given to him."

[56] In 1879, Crichton-Browne published his own considerations of the neuropathology of insanity[57] making some detailed predictions about the morbid anatomy of the brain in cases of severe psychiatric disorder.

[57] In 1875, Crichton-Browne was appointed as Lord Chancellor's Medical Visitor in Lunacy, a position which involved the regular examination of wealthy Chancery patients throughout England and Wales.

He greatly assisted the Association's negotiations with the Local Government Board (predecessor of the Ministry of Health) in its attempts to secure the improved education and training of sanitary inspectors.

[citation needed] He was regarded with much affection and respect by the sanitary inspectors and he was a frequently invited speaker at their conferences and dinners — although his speeches could be repetitive and lengthy.

[73] In this, he delivered a tribute to members of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society: to George Combe (1788–1858) author of The Constitution of Man (1828), to Andrew Combe (1797–1847) author of Observations on Mental Derangement (1831), and to Robert Chambers (1802–1871) who had sought to combine phrenology with evolutionary Lamarckism in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation[74][75][76] – written in St Andrews as Chambers recuperated from depression, and published in 1844.

[80][81] However, his unusual longevity, taken together with his father's distinguished psychiatric career, brought the world of the Edinburgh phrenologists into contact with developing neuroscience in the course of the 20th century; and Crichton-Browne's considerations of the cerebral basis of psychotic disorder were well ahead of their time.

His collaboration with David Ferrier on cerebral localisation, and the development of the journal Brain, give him a central role in early British neurology; and his protracted correspondence with Charles Darwin - over a period of several years - highlights the mutual engagement of psychiatry and evolutionary theory in the later nineteenth century.

Social Policy: Very early in his career, Crichton-Browne stressed the importance of psychiatric disorders in childhood[82] and, much later, he was to emphasise the distinction between organic and functional illness in the elderly.

He stressed the importance of the asymmetric lateralization of brain function in the development of language, and deplored the fads relating to ambidexterity advocated by (among others) Robert Baden-Powell.

Crichton-Browne was twice married and, like his mother, cherished a lifelong affection for the traditions of the Anglican liturgy; he was a loyal member of the congregation at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Dumfries.

At his death on 31 January 1938 at the age of 97, Crichton-Browne – like Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle and James Clerk Maxwell – was acclaimed as one of the greatest sons of South-West Scotland; as one of the last men in Britain to sport Dundreary whiskers – and as one of the last Victorians.