Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1191

ALEXANDER CRICHTON (1763-1856) Untersuchung über die Natur und den Ursprung der Geistes-Zerrüttung. August Bauer 1810 2nd ed. xxxii [4] 608 pp. 17 cm.

Crichton studied medicine at Edinburgh and London before receiving his degree at Leiden in 1785. He then traveled about Europe to further his medical knowledge and returned to practice in London. In 1794 he was elected physician to London's Westminster Hospital where he lectured on the theory and practice of physic, chemistry, and materia medica. In 1804 he was offered the appointment of physician in ordinary to the emperor Alexander I of Russia. Crichton was eventually asked to head the Russian civil medical department and did not return to England until the 1820s. He wrote the first edition of this work in his native language in 1798 while at Westminster Hospital. An important contribution to psychiatry, Crichton combined the latest psychological knowledge with medicine's clinical experiences of mental illness. His chief goal was to analyze the human mind and explore the causes of mental disease. Crichton did not have extensive experience in clinical psychiatry and drew heavily on the German literature for illustrative case histories. He was also one of the first who discussed the forensic aspects of psychiatry in an English treatise on the subject and played an important role in identifying aphasia as a disease or injury of the brain centers and not necessarily a mental illness. The work was immediately translated into German in 1798 and this second edition was translated by Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (1766-1827), a professor of philosophy at Halle.

Cited references: Waller 2216 (1st English ed., 1798); Wellcome II, p. 407 (1st English ed.)