Dennis Brown

Many readers of the BJP will have known Dennis Brown who was on the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Journal, and will have heard the very sad news of his death at the comparatively early age of 76. Various formal obituaries have already appeared, which leaves me free to write one that is a little more personal about a man who commanded very great affection and respect for reasons that I hope will become apparent.

Dennis was born, a twin, in 1928, and qualified in medicine at Leeds in 1951, ‘a triple bachelor’ as he put it, going on to become a Fulbright scholar at Cornell College in the United States. Here he became interested in dermatology, writing a dissertation on the psychological aspects of dermatitis. On his return to this country, he specialized in psychiatry, working as a lecturer at Leeds University. His decision to train as a psychoanalyst brought him to London where he worked as a medical assistant at the Cassel Hospital and as a research assistant to Sir Denis Hill at the Middlesex. His findings became the basis of what was to become his MD thesis, ‘A study of the significance of psychological symptoms in eczema’. He subsequently became consultant psychotherapist at St George's Hospital between 1969 and 1974, thereafter going as consultant psychotherapist to St Mary's Hospital in Paddington. Here he worked with his fellow consultant psychotherapist Jonathan Pedder with whom he wrote their justly acclaimed Introduction to Psychotherapy.

I was both honoured and fortunate to join him in 1980, when Jonathan had retired. We worked together in the therapeutic milieu which operated on all the wards and in the day hospital. Together, we were able to assess something over a hundred patients a year for individual and group psychotherapy, most of whom were seen under our supervision within the department of psychiatry until political and funding arrangements made this impossible.

Dennis retired in 1987, angry essentially, both at the divisions in the department and a