SUMMARY OF LIFE
Scottish physician John Brown was born in Berwickshire, Scotland. Brown attended the parish school in a small town nameed Duns in Berwickshire. From there, Brown moved to Edinburgh (in Scotland) where he enrolled in divinity classes taught at the University of Edinburgh, in addition to some part-time private tutoring. It was this, in addition to him dropping his theological studies to pursue medicine that really changed his life. His medical studies eventually attracted the attention of fellow Scottish physician William Cullen. Interested, Cullen employed Brown as a private tutor for his family as well indirectly employing him as an assistant professor. Over time, however, tension grew and the two turned against each other. After a particular disagreement with Cullen and some of the other professors of the university, from 1778 on, Brown's public lectures began including attacks on previous systems of medicine, including Cullen's. The medical world remained a dog-eat-dog/every-man-for-himself world. In 1780 Brown published his Elementa Medicinae (Elements of Medicine) which detailed his Brunonian system of medicine, a system which rivaled Cullen's. Six years later (1786), Brown traveled to London, intending on trying his luck and improving his fortunes. Unfortuntately, two years later, on October 17, 1788, John Brown died of apoplexy (what we now may call a stroke).
CONTRIBUTIONS: THE BRUNONIAN SYSTEM OF MEDICINE
Scottish physician John Brown developed this medical system based around diseases as casued by defective or excessive excitation (excitability), which he outlined in his 1780 publication Elementa Medicinae--a system which was not only based upon the theories of his teacher, William Cullen, but completely rivaled his teacher's own system of medicine. According to an excerpt from 1902 Encyclopedia's "Medicine" (Part 33):
"It is difficult to form a clear estimate of the importance of the last systematizer of medicine, John Brown (1735-88), for, though in England he has been but little regarded, the wide though short-lived popularity of his system on the Continent shows that it must have contained some elements of brilliancy, if not originality. His theory of medicine professed to explain the processes of life and disease and the methods of cure, upon one simple principle, -- that of the property of "excitability," in virtue of which the "exciting powers," defined as being (1) external forces and (2) the functions of the system itself, call forth the vital phenomena "sense, motion, mental function, and passion." All exciting powers are stimulant, the apparent debilitating or sedative effect of some being due to a deficiency in the degree of stimulus; so that the final conclusion is that "the whole phenomena of life, health as well as disease, consist in stimulus and noting else." Brown recognized some diseases as sthenic, others as asthenic, the latter requiring stimulating treatment, the former the reverse; but his practical conclusion was that 97 per cent of all diseases required a "stimulating" treatment. In this he claimed to have made the most salutary reform because all physicians from Hippocrates had treated diseases by depletion and debilitating measures with the object of curing by elimination. It would be unprofitable to attempt a complete analysis of the Brunonian system; and it is difficult now to understand why it attracted so much attention in its day. To us at the present time it seems merely a dialectical construction, having its beginning and end in definition, the words powers, stimulus, &c., being used in such a way as not to correspond to any precise physical conceptions, still less to definite material objects or forces. One recommendation of the system was that it favoured a milder system of treatment than was at that time in vogue; Brown may be said to have been the first advocate of the modern stimulant or feeding treatment of fevers. He advocated the use of "animal soups" or beef tea. Further he had the discernment to see that certain symptoms, such as convulsions and delirium, which were then commonly held always to indicate inflammation, were often really signs of weakness." (http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/M/MED/medicine-33.html)
