Sir John Batty Tuke PRCPE FRSE LLD (9 January 1835 – 13 October 1913) was one of the most influential psychiatrists in Scotland in the late nineteenth century, and a Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1910.

[1][2][3] Tuke's career in Edinburgh from 1863 to 1910 spanned a period of significant social and political changes in asylum governance and care in Scotland.

[4] Tuke's professional success in public and private practice and his powerful role in several prominent medical societies allowed him to influence his colleagues toward a more physiological understanding of mental illness and its treatment.

[5] Under the tutelage of the then superintendent David Skae Tuke quickly developed a niche in puerperal insanity and published influential articles on the subject.

[13] As his career progressed Tuke also occupied positions of leadership within the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and wrote an influential article on the "cottage system" of care for insane people where he criticised the traditional Scottish practices of caring for "incurable" insane people by boarding them out with often destitute members of the community in exchange for meager compensation.

[15] This move marked a change from public to private care and Tuke also set up a practice in Charlotte Square as a "specialist in mental diseases".

[22] Tuke proposed that both the public and profession had been hampered by Hippocratic classifications of insanity that were entirely psychological and led to an ignorance of brain anatomy, physiology and pathology, and a focus on behavioural symptoms.

Tuke saw these ideas as slowing the progress of treatment and scientific understanding since they "construct a psychological nexus between cause and symptom without demonstration of structural change in cortical tissues".

Tuke heralded the study of mental illness through brain anatomy as the way to "a rational system of treatment”and enjoined his colleagues to consider their patients "first as invalids and as an insane person after".

from Trinity College, Dublin where he was praised for having made "the first important step in the very obscure subject of the connection of the anatomy of the brain with mental derangement.