PRICHARD, JAMES COWLES English physician and ethnologist, was born on Feb. II, 1786, at Ross, Herefordshire. He adopted medicine as a profession mainly be cause of the facilities it offered for anthropological investigations. He took his M.D. at Edinburgh, afterwards reading for a year at Trinity College, Cambridge, whence, joining the Church of Eng land, he migrated to St. John's College, Oxford, afterwards enter ing as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford, but tak ing no degree in either university. In 18io he settled at Bristol as a physician, and in 1813 published his Researches into the Physi cal History of Man. The central principle of the book is the primitive unity of the human species, acted upon by causes which have since divided it into permanent varieties or races.
In 1843 was published his Natural History of Man. Prichard may fairly be called the founder of the English branch of the sciences of anthropology and ethnology. In 1811 he was appointed physician to St. Peter's hospital, Bristol, and in 1814 to the Bristol infirmary. In 1822 he published a Treatise on Diseases of the
Nervous System, and in 1835 a Treatise on Insanity and other Disorders affecting the Mind, in which he advanced the theory of the existence of a distinct mental disease, "moral insanity." In 1842, following up this suggestion, he published On the different forms of Insanity in relation to Jurisprudence designed for the use of Persons concerned in Legal Questions regarding Unsound ness of Mind. In 1845 he was made a commissioner in lunacy, and removed to London. He died there on Dec. 23, 1848. At the time of his death he was president of the Ethnological Society and a fellow of the Royal Society.
See Memoir by Dr. Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) in the Journal of the Ethnological Society (Feb. 1849) ; Memoir read before the Bath and Bristol branch of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (March 1849) by Dr. J. A. Symonds Journ. Eth. Soc., (18o); Prichard and Symonds in Special Relation to Mental Science, by Dr. Hack Tuke (1891).