author
Sanger Brown
1884–1968
An early-20th-century psychiatrist and medical writer, he explored both child psychiatry and the cultural meanings people have attached to sex and symbolism. His books reflect a period when medicine, psychology, and anthropology often crossed paths in surprising ways.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in White Plains, New York, on May 28, 1884, Sanger Brown II came from a family closely connected to psychiatry. He studied at the University of Toronto and earned his medical degree in 1907 from Johns Hopkins, later building a career in public mental health.
Brown served in New York State's mental health system and was remembered as a former Assistant Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. He also wrote on psychiatric care, including work on the study of children with behavioral and emotional difficulties.
Readers may know him best for The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races, a book that brings together psychology, religion, and anthropology in a way that now feels distinctly of its time. Even when modern readers may question some of its older assumptions, his writing offers a window into how scholars and physicians of the early 1900s tried to understand culture, belief, and the human mind.