John Brown (doctor)

John Brown (1735 – 17 October 1788) was a Scottish physician and the creator of the Brunonian system of medicine.

Brown was born in Berwickshire and after attending the parish school at Duns, he moved to Edinburgh and enrolled in divinity classes at the University of Edinburgh and worked part-time as a private tutor. In 1759 he discontinued his theological studies and began the study of medicine and became the private tutor for the family of the leading Edinburgh physician William Cullen. After a dispute with Cullen and the professors of the university, Brown's public lectures contained attacks on preceding systems of medicine, including Cullen's. He received his medical degree from St Andrews in 1779.

In 1780 he published his Elementa Medicinae (Elements of Medicine in its English version), which for a time was an influential text. It set out his theories, often called the Brunonian system of medicine, which essentially understood all diseases as a matter of over or under-stimulation. Brown labeled over-stimulation as the sthenic state and under-stimulation as the asthenic state. For sthenic diseases, Brown's treatments included vomiting, cold air, and purging. For asthenic diseases, Brown prescribed opium, roast beef, and alcoholic beverages. He wrote that "all life consists in stimulus, and both over-abundance and deficiency is productive of diseases."

His medical ideas proved highly influential for the next few decades, especially in Italy and Germany. His medical theory was based on the principle that all disease was caused by an unbalance of "excitability", which referred to the body's ability to react to stimuli. Brown believed that excitement could be measured mathematically similar to the use of degrees on a thermometer. Jacob Friedrich Ludwig Lentin’s Medizinische Bemerkungen auf ein literarischen Reise durch Deutschland (1800) talked about German medicine being dominated by the struggles of Brunonians and "anti-Brunonian terrorists." There are also reports of 400 students rioting in a dispute between the two sides in the German university city of Göttingen in 1802. By 1817, however, the German historian of medicine Kurt Sprengel suggested that Brunonian medicine "has very few supporters."

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