James Cowles Prichard MD FRS (11 February 1786, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire – 23 December 1848) was an English physician and ethnologist. His influential Researches into the physical history of mankind touched upon the subject of evolution. He was also the first person to name senile dementia.[1]
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His parents Thomas and Mary Prichard were Quakers:[2] his mother Welsh, and his father of an English family who had emigrated to Pennsylvania. Within a few years of his birth in Ross, Prichard's parents moved to Bristol, where his father now worked in the Quaker ironworks of Harford, Partridge and Cowles. Upon his father's retirement in 1800 he returned to Ross. As a child Prichard was educated mainly at home by tutors and his father, in a range of subjects, including modern languages and general literature.[3]
Rejecting his father's wish that he should join the ironworks, Prichard decided upon a medical career. Here he faced the difficulty that as a Quaker he could not become a member of the Royal College of Physicians. Therefore he started on apprenticeships that led to the ranks of apothcaries and surgeons. The first step was to study under the Quaker obstetrician Dr Thomas Pole of Bristol. Apprenticeships followed to other Quaker physicians, and to St Thomas' Hospital in London. Eventually, in 1805, he took the plunge: he entered medical school at Edinburgh University, where his religious affiliation was no bar. Also, Scottish universities were in esteem, having contributed greatly to the Enlightenment of the previous century.
He took his M.D. at Edinburgh, his doctoral thesis of 1808 being his first attempt at the great question of his life: the origin of human varieties and races.[4] Later, he read for a year at Trinity College, Cambridge,[5] after which came a significant personal event: he left the Society of Friends to join the established Church of England. He next moved to St John's College, Oxford, afterwards entering as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford, but taking no degree in either university.[3]
In 1810 Prichard settled at Bristol as a physician, eventually attaining an established position at the Bristol Infirmary in 1816.
In 1845 he was made one of the three medical Commissioners in Lunacy, having previously been one of the Metropolitan Commissioners,[6] and moved to London. He died there three years later of rheumatic fever. At the time of his death he was president of the Ethnological Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society.[7]
In 1813 he published his Researches into the Physical History of Man, in 2 vols, on essentially the same themes as his dissertation in 1808. The book grew until the 3rd ed of 1836-47 occupied five volumes. The central conclusion of the work is the primitive unity of the human species, acted upon by causes which have since divided it into permanent varieties or races. The work is dedicated to Blumenbach, whose five races of man are adopted. But where Prichard excelled Blumenbach and all his other predecessors was in his grasp of the principle that people should be studied by combining all available characters.
Three British men, all medically qualified and publishing between 1813 and 1819, William Lawrence, William Charles Wells and Prichard, addressed issues relevant to human evolution. All tackled the question of variation and race in humans; all agreed that these differences were heritable, but only Wells approached the idea of natural selection as a cause. Prichard, however, indicates Africa (indirectly) as the place of human origin, in this summary passage:
This striking opinion was omitted in later editions, for reasons which are unclear. As a consequence of this and other changes, Prichard's book was at its best (so far as this point goes) in its shorter first edition.[9] However, others have identified the second edition as the best for its evolutionary ideas.[10]
In 1843 Prichard published his Natural History of Man, in which he reiterated his belief in the specific unity of man, pointing out that the same inward and mental nature can be recognized in all the races.[11] Prichard was an early member of the Aboriginal Protection Society, which influenced the 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act.
Prichard was influential in ethnology and anthropology. He stated that the Celtic languages are allied by language with the Slavonian, German and Pelasgian (Greek and Latin), thus forming a fourth European branch of Indo-European languages. His treatise containing Celtic compared with Sanskrit words appeared in 1831 under the title Eastern Origin of the Celtic nations. An essay by Adolphe Pictet, which made its author's reputation, was published independently of the earlier investigations of Prichard.[12]
In medicine, he specialised in what is now psychiatry. In 1822 he published A treatise on diseases of the nervous system[13] (pt. I), and in 1835 a Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind, in which he advanced the theory of the existence of a distinct mental illness called moral insanity. Prichard's work was also the first definition of senile dementia in the English language.[1] In 1842, following up on moral insanity, he published On the different forms of insanity in relation to jurisprudence] designed for the use of persons concerned in legal questions regarding unsoundness of mind.[14]
Among his other works were:
He married Anne Maria Estlin, daughter of John Prior Estlin.[15] They had ten children.[16]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.