A Brief Biography of Herbert Brown
William Herbert Brown was born on 28th March 1878, in Ibroxholm, which is now part of the south side of the city of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the son of Joseph Brown, master starch maker, and Elizabeth Brown, née Hay. Herbert Brown was educated at the High School of Glasgow and the University of Glasgow, qualifying in medicine (MB, ChB) in 1901 and being awarded MD, with honours, in 1906.
e industrial East End of Glasgow, but developed an interest in dermatology and venereology. He served as Assistant in Dermatology at the newly built Bellahouston Dispensary. This clinic in Tradeston was an outpost of the Victoria Infirmary, a voluntary hospital itself recently founded to serve Glasgow's growing population south of the river Clyde. On the premature death in 1911 of his chief, David Couper, Brown succeeded to this post.
At the outbreak of the Great War, Brown enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in military hospitals. Following demobilisation in 1919, he was appointed as the first Consulting Physician for Diseases of the Skin at the Victoria Infirmary.
Extensive experience of venereology in peace and war - an astounding 19000 cases - together with his skill in photography, provided the material for his publication in 1920, with C F White, of the Atlas of the Primary and Cutaneous Lesions of Acquired Syphilis in the Male. This copiously illustrated volume is unusual in its inclusion of numerous stereoscopic clinical photographs.
Brown's subsequent career was wholly spent in Glasgow, where he divided his time between hospital and clinic duties, and consulting practice conducted at his home. He lived at number 11 in Park Circus, a terrace of grand Victorian houses atop a hill in the affluent West End of the city.
Among a triumvirate of notable Glasgow dermatologists of his time, Brown was the senior member, and was regarded as pre-eminent; the others were Dr John Ferguson Smith (who described the eponymous familial self-healing epitheliomas) and Dr Allison MacLachlan. Although not numerous, Brown's contributions to the literature were always thoughtful. His continuing interest in photography resulted in a large collection of clinical photographs, some of which illustrated the textbooks of his contemporaries. He also retained his interest in Venereology, and in consequence the Broomielaw Clinic (in the Glasgow docklands area) is said to have become "famous throughout the Seven Seas".
Brown was respected as a teacher, although his tall, spare, figure not surprisingly gave rise to the nickname "Skinny" Brown amongst medical students. Some idea of his aquiline appearance is given by the affectionate choice of quotation by his name one of the Final Year Dinners, likening him to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: "He holds him with his skinny hand .... He holds him by his glittering eye..."
A founder member of the British Association of Dermatologists, Brown served as its president in 1940-41. He was also a founder member of the North British Dermatological Society, now the Scottish Dermatological Society.
Herbert Brown retired in 1945, shortly before the inception of the National Health Service in Britain, and died in March 1959. His obituaries, and others who remember him, pay tribute not only to his skill as a clinical dermatologist - "the doyen of the Glasgow School" - but also to his charm to young and old and his delightful and lovable personality. It is said also that he was a most charitable man, who without ostentation devoted much time to the welfare of the needy.
Brown married in middle life and had no children. After his death, his widow endowed an annual prize for the best student in Dermatology at the Victoria Infirmary. At the Victoria he also left a vast collection of clinical photographs - monochrome and hand-tinted, monoscopic and stereoscopic, many annotated in his striking hand - accompanied by over a thousand glass-plate negatives. It is this legacy which forms the broader testament both to the clinical, teaching, and photographic skills of a remarkable man, and to the practice of dermatology and venereology in the first half of the twentieth century.