James Cowles Prichard
- Born
- 11 February 1786
- Died
- 23 December 1848 (age 62)
James Cowles Prichard was a man of many interests, from psychiatry to anthropology to linguistics. He was one of the first people to say that the entire human race and ethnic groups are one single species.
Prichard was born into a family of Quakers, at a time when religious dissidence could have serious implications for a person’s education and career. His father wanted Prichard to follow him in the iron works trade, but Prichard was determined to pursue a career in medicine. He was barred from joining the Royal College of Physicians because of his religion. He apprenticed under many Quaker physicians before working at St. Thomas’s Hospital, and was then accepted to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
Prichard’s initial work was on the origin of humans and the nature of ethnicity. He did not travel abroad himself but investigated the work of others. In his 1843 book, Natural History of Man, he stated that all humans were a single species and he was the first person to suggest that early humans were black. In the process, addressing questions such as why skin colour varied, he touched on what we would now call natural selection, despite writing more than 30 years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published.
As a physician, Prichard’s speciality was psychiatry. His most famous contribution to the field was probably to coin the term moral insanity (akin to what we would describe as psychopathy today). He used this term to describe people who did not have feelings and could not make ethical judgements, but who could still function intellectually. While moral insanity is discredited today, it was influential in developing the idea that someone can be not guilty of a crime because of insanity. Prichard is also notable for writing the first English definition of senile dementia.
a man who was both behind and ahead of his time
The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine. Suzanne Le May Sheffield, Dalhousie University, on James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth Century Britain. H F Augstein.
For Prichard, the occurrence of moral insanity across races and similar grammatical constructions of language across Egyptian, Hebrew, Indian and European races was evidence to him of the connections between, and unity of, the human race.
Prichard went on to be become a Commissioner in Lunacy, overseeing asylums and the welfare of mentally ill people.
He was also influential in the field of linguistics. In Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations, in 1831, he established a link between Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Irish, and other Indo-European languages including Sanskrit, Latin or German.
This profile was written by a Biology: Changing the World volunteer.