Thomas Graham Brown, 1882-1965

Abstract

Thomas Graham Brown was a neurophysiologist well known in the twenties for the detailed studies of reflex movement and posture which he made by Sherrington’s methods, and perhaps better known in the thirties as the redoubtable climber who had found several new routes to the summit of Mont Blanc. He was born in 1882 in Edinburgh. His father, Dr J. J. Graham Brown, was to be President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1912 and was related to several of the eminent doctors who had maintained the reputation of the Edinburgh Medical School throughout the nineteenth century. It was natural therefore that the son should be trained to medicine and should go to his father’s school, the Edinburgh Academy, and afterwards to the University as a medical student. There were four children in the family, Thomas, the eldest, a brother who became a Captain in the Royal Navy, one who became an architect and one sister. The two elder boys used sometimes to sail with their father in the yacht which he shared with a friend, and in Thomas the interest revived when he was too old for climbing but could still make long cruises in a small motor boat. When he was a schoolboy he was fond of swimming and diving, skating and golf, but there was a period when his eyesight was troublesome and he was sent to an oculist friend of his father in Wiesbaden to be treated and to learn German.