Brunonian system of medicine

The Brunonian system of medicine is a theory of medicine which regards and treats disorders as caused by defective or excessive . It was developed by the Scottish physician John Brown and is outlined in his 1780 publication Elementa Medicinae. It drew on the theories of his teacher William Cullen, but whereas Cullen set out to create a systematic nosology of diseases, Brown argued for a unified model in which all disease was related to stimulation.

Although Brown's theory never became very popular in Britain, it had temporary success in America, Italy, and the German-speaking part of Europe.

John Brown was born in 1735 and died in 1788, not very long after having written his master work, Elementa Medicinae (Elements of Medicine) in 1780. He was apparently studied to be a clergyman, but then studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and received his degree at St Andrew's. He commenced his medical practice in Edinburgh, but opposition to his new ideas, as set out in his Elementa Medicinae resulted in his move to London in 1786.

Brown worked with and studied under one of the foremost medical practitioners and theoreticians of the time, William Cullen. Cullen and Brown, however, had a falling out. Brown was likely influenced by Cullen's ideas on the capacity for nerves and muscles to be excited or stimulated (similar to the work of Haller in Germany on 'irritability'), but Brown looked at the issue of excitation in a broader and more dynamic manner. One scholarly article relates the influence of Galvanism and Mesmerism on Brown's work. Brown himself relates in the Introduction to his magnum opus, Elementa Medicinae, that his ideas came from an attack of gout, but in a period when his dietary intake was less rather than more. Since the cause of gout was then held to be a problem of excess, he was put on a strict vegetable diet with no wine or alcohol for a year, but instead of the promised cure, he had four "exceedingly violent" episodes. This led him to consider the effects of different foods and drinks and try a different approach, that of an invigorating or stimulating diet which proved successful. According to the Encyclopædia Perthensis, "Thus, from personal experience of the inefficacy of the former medical practice in the gout, he was led to review the whole old system of medicine."

Some 14 years after Brown's initial edition, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, in the introduction to the American edition of 1816 of his Zoonomia, placed Brown in the context of the stream of medicine from the time of the Greeks. Darwin recounts that one day, Brown told him personally that he challenged Cullen on "the incomprehensible ideas of atony and spasm existing in the same vessels of the body at the same time" and "thereby provoked him to manifest signs of impatience and displeasure" the result being a "coolness" that "increased at last…to rooted aversion and deep opposition." But it was this resistance from Cullen and irritation of mind that it provoked that is, according to Darwin, "to be ascribed no small portion of that resolution and energy with which he laboured out a System of Medical Philosophy, which, though not free from errors, borrows, however, none from Cullen."

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