Snowy Campbell, Australian Pioneer Investigator of the Brain by Malcolm Macmillan

Abstract

Health & History Ɣ 19/1 Ɣ 2017 127 Malcolm Macmillan, Snowy Campbell, Australian Pioneer Investigator of the Brain (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). ISBN 978-1-925333-74-9 (PB) B&W and colour illustrations, xi + 390 pp. PioneeringAustralian neurologist, neuropathologist, and psychiatrist, Alfred Walter (‘Snowy’) Campbell, was notoriously reticent—as well as somewhat playful—about his medical achievements. When asked what he did during a period in England in the 1890s and early 1900s when he conducted a bevy of gifted research studies, he responded that when he wasn’t playing cricket he was shooting grouse! In this commendable biography by psychologist, Malcolm Macmillan, we learn that his modesty was matched by tenacity in grasping the opportunities that came his way. Campbell (1868–1937) was the sports-loving son of an innovative NSW farm manager of Scottish, Danish, and French extraction and a plucky mother who stood up to a band of bushrangers in an 1863 attack on the family home. She died after childbirth in 1870, leaving three young children including two-year-old ‘Snowy’. In adolescence he attended Oaklands School in Mittagong, NSW, which provided a classical education for boys ‘from families of more considerable means’. After achieving ‘decidedly inauspicious’ results in the senior public examinations held by the University of Sydney, he gained entry to Edinburgh University where he studied medicine from 1885 to 1889, his results improving over the years but not, according to Macmillan, to the stellar levels sometimes claimed for him. Soon after qualifying in medicine and surgery in Edinburgh, Campbell passed the Certi¿cate of Experience in Psychological Medicine, a credential offered by the Medico-Psychological Association for Great Britain and Ireland. It enabled him to work in several English county mental asylums, where he found himself attracted to the scienti¿c side of the work. A year in Vienna and Prague followed, with Campbell catapulted into several new and developing ¿elds, combining histology, pathology and bacteriology. The boy from country NSW intended ‘to take of¿ce in one of the few large institutions then affording collateral facilities for general administrative experience and special scienti¿c study’, but his aspirations expanded in line with the laboratories he sampled. At ¿rst he worked as a voluntary assistant in the pathology laboratory of Professor Heinrich Obersteiner, from the Neurological 128 BOOK REVIEWS Institute in Vienna, who had just published a major work on the structure of the central nervous system. He then gained experience in the laboratories of Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing, head of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, and those of Professors Arnold Pick and Hans Chiari in Prague. It was an exciting time to be in Europe with ongoing progress in identifying clinical phases of mental diseases and pathological changes in the brain, and in devising new techniques for postmortem examinations at a time when germ theory was challenging old notions of pathology and disease causation. At the very least, Campbell greatly expanded his histopathological methods while abroad and, after returning to Edinburgh in 1892, wrote his MD (Doctor of Medicine) thesis. It focussed on the nervous system changes associated with ‘alcoholic neuritis’, a painful condition of the hands, feet, and limbs. The following year, and still only in his mid-twenties, he joined the Lancaster County Asylum, called Rainhill, near Liverpool where he quickly rose from assistant medical of¿cer to mental hospital pathologist. During the next twelve years, he completed some trailblazing studies, resulting in more than forty publications. The topics were diverse and resulted in a wealth of papers on topics including the histopathology of shingles (herpes zoster) in collaboration with up-and-coming English neurologist, Henry Head, and on the bacterial causes of colitis (asylum dysentery), which was almost endemic in many mental hospitals. He also carried out a study on the then quite controversial topic of the rib strength of asylum patients and their proneness to fracture. This may sound like a humdrum subject, but Macmillan brings it to life, explaining that Campbell’s study method and conclusions served to debunk a treasured theory of some senior colleagues while also raising the possibility of nefarious staff practices that might explain some of the bone breakages in asylums. In the years...