Background
James Cowles Prichard was born on February 11, 1786, in Ross, Herefordshire, England. Prichard was the eldest of four children born to Thomas and Mary Prichard.
Royal Society, London, England, United Kingdom
Prichard was a member of the Royal Society.
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Prichard took his Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh University.
Trinity College, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
After receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree, Prichard studied at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Saint John’s College, St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JP, England, United Kingdom
After attending classes at Trinity College, Cambridge, Prichard studied at Saint John’s and Trinity colleges, Oxford.
Oxford University, Oxford, England, United Kingdom
In 1835 Prichard received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.
anthropologist ethnologist historian linguist physician scientist
James Cowles Prichard was born on February 11, 1786, in Ross, Herefordshire, England. Prichard was the eldest of four children born to Thomas and Mary Prichard.
In 1802 Prichard began his apprenticeship in medicine (the only profession readily accessible to Dissenters) under Thomas Pole of Bristol and then under Robert Pope and William Tothill of Staines, all prominent Quakers. In 1805 he attended lectures at Saint Thomas’s Hospital, London, and in the summer of 1806 entered the Medical Faculty of the University of Edinburgh, then at the peak of its renown. At Edinburgh, he met weekly with members of a private debating society, the Azygotic, in which anthropological topics were often discussed. In addition to medical courses, he attended Dugald Stewart's lectures on moral philosophy; and it was a remark in one of these that stimulated Prichard, in 1808, to devote his medical dissertation to human races. This short monograph was later expanded into his Researches Into the Physical History of Mankind, a monumental work which, in its third edition, comprised five lengthy volumes and remained a major reference work in anthropology into the 1870s. Having received his Doctor of Medicine, Prichard studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, after converting to the Church of England (from Quakerism), at Saint John’s and Trinity colleges, Oxford.
In 1835 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.
In 1811 Prichard became a physician to Saint Peter’s Hospital, Bristol, and in 1814 to the Bristol Infirmary; he also developed a substantial private practice. Prichard was a pioneer in the “moral” treatment of insanity, a subject on which he wrote several influential books. In 1835 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford and in 1845 was appointed a commissioner of lunacy in London.
In 1813 he introduced John Hunter's view that civilization (or domestication, in the case of animals) conduced to the appearance of lighter coloration and proposed that racial differences were due to varying progress from an originally dark, uncivilized stock. In 1826 he abandoned this view but was pressed, because of evidence of racial adaptation, to acknowledge a factor in the environment that produced variants, which were able to survive in specific regions.
Prichard recognized the inconsistency in his position but was unable to resolve it; and in the final version of his work on races, published from 1836 to 1847, he omitted the discussion of heredity, variation, and race formation. Since this was the edition read by most scientists, including Darwin, Prichard’s direct influence on thinking about these topics was probably minor. Indirectly, however, he did have an effect; William Lawrence drew extensively upon the 1808 dissertation in his much-reprinted and influential Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (London, 1819).
In the study of geographical distribution, Prichard’s influence was more immediate. He addressed this topic, from 1813, in order to establish that if man is a single species, in the sense of having no “constant and perpetual” racial differences, then he is likely to be descended from a single original stock. Taking this point for granted was a fallacy for which Buffon had been criticized. Prichard assembled masses of evidence to show that every species is either isolated in the region of its origin or is spread only over regions across which plausible courses of migration (either now or in the past) can be charted. Finding such localization to be the rule, rather than the exception, he concluded that man, if a single species, must have originated in a single place and, therefore, most likely from a single stock. Contemporary scientists, including Lyell and Swainson, cited Prichard’s evidence together with Candolle’s and gave his work the highest praise.
Prichard’s greatest influence was as an anthropologist. In his effort to show mankind to be a single species, he compiled evidence in four different fields. First, he examined physiological and psychological characters of races; indeed, he was one of the first to conceive the possibility of comparative psychology. Second, he sought examples of stable populations formed by racial hybridization. Third, he followed Blumenbach in comparing racial anatomy, endeavoring to show racial variation comparable to variation within accepted animal species. Fourth, he conducted what he called his “ethnographical investigation,” in which he surveyed the entire world, country by country, assembling not only physical descriptions but also linguistic and cultural evidence of connections among races. The first three of these investigations were fairly rapidly superseded by the work of others. The fourth, however, which was quite original in the context of race theory, had more lasting usefulness.
Prichard was increasingly convinced, as his work proceeded, that cultural and linguistic “artifacts” were the surest index to the history of races. He, therefore, devoted four volumes to such material in the third edition of Researches, as well as two more specialized treatises, An Analysis of the Egyptian Mythology (London, 1819; second edition, London, 1838), and Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (London, 1831). (In the latter work, he anticipated Adolphe Pictet in arguing for the Indo-European character of the Celtic languages.) These studies, which had their roots in the British antiquarian tradition, were given serious although somewhat grudging attention by German historical linguists and students of mythology and were later praised by E. B. Tylor.
Prichard failed to convince his successors of the single origin of mankind. Shortly after his death, the majority view of anthropologists swung definitely to the contrary position; and, somewhat later, the entire question was put on a different footing by the theory of evolution. Prichard’s methodology, which had no element of fieldwork, was also rapidly superseded. Yet, in assembling an enormous store of organized data on human populations, which even in the 1870s Paul Topinard called the anthropologist’s vade mecum, Prichard laid important groundwork for later research.
At some point Prichard left the Society of Friends to join the established Church of England.
Prichard wrote that his anthropological interests were first aroused by hearing a challenge to the Scripture regarding the single origin of human races. Although he was convinced of single-origin, he was unable to believe that racial differences were caused by the direct action of environmental factors, as maintained by Buffon, Blumenbach, and other authorities. In his medical dissertation, he argued that changes due to external factors affect only the individual and are not transmitted to the next generation.
The origin of races, and of animal and plant varieties in general, he attributed instead to the accumulation of what he called “connate” variations, which appeared for unknown reasons in the ovum or germ of the parents and which were invariably transmitted to the offspring. He supported this claim by cases from the medical literature (including albinism and other hereditary skin conditions) and by the accomplishments of animal breeders. Prichard had thus sketched a position similar to that upon which Darwin later based his theory of natural selection. In successive expansions of his dissertation, Prichard elaborated his theory of connate variations, although he equivocated increasingly about the role of external conditions.
Prichard became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1827 and of the Ethnological Society.
In 1811 Prichard married Anne Maria Estlin, whose father was a friend of Coleridge, Priestley, and Southey. They had ten children, eight of whom survived infancy, including Augustin Prichard (1818-1898), Constantine Estlin Prichard (born 1820), Theodore Joseph Prichard (born 1821), Illtiodus Thomas Prichard (born 1825), Edith Prichard (born 1829), and Albert Herman Prichard (born 1831).