About

The Bristol-based physician-scholar who championed humane psychiatry & the single origin of the human race.

During the autumn of 1800, adolescent James Cowles Prichard spent several weeks in Bath, watching his affluent father's gout-swollen limbs gradually recover. Dr Prichard would become Britain's premier psychiatric theorist of international repute. He published textbooks on neurology and psychiatry and their jurisprudence, advocating humane treatments and challenging the would-be science of phrenology.

Prichard is also remembered as the founder of British anthropology. From 1813 until mid-century, his many strikingly illustrated publications on the science of humankind sought to demonstrate the single origin and physical and psychological unity of the human race at a time when there was a growing pernicious belief in the existence of multiple human species.

Speaker Margaret M. Crump is an independent scholar in nineteenth-century British intellectual and cultural history