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Psychiatry in descent: Darwin and the Brownes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Tom Walmsley
Tom Walmsley*
Affiliation:
Knowle Hospital, Fareham PO17 5NA
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Charles Darwin (1809–1882) enjoys an uneasy position in the history of psychiatry. In general terms, he showed a personal interest in the plight of the mentally ill and an astute empathy for psychiatric patients. On the other hand, he has generated derogatory views of insanity, especially through the writings of English social philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Samuel Butler, the Italian School of “criminal anthropology” and French alienists including Victor Magnan and Benedict Morel.

Information

Type
Sketches from the history of psychiatry
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 17 , Issue 12 , December 1993 , pp. 748 - 751
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 1993

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