In 1956 a letter arrived for George Brown. The Social Psychiatry Research Unit in Camberwell, south London, needed an anthropology graduate and Brown had been recommended by a former tutor. Since graduating two years before, he had had only numbing jobs including supervising time and motion studies, and he leaped at the chance.
Brown, who has died aged 95, went on to have a six-decade academic career, becoming a pre-eminent medical sociologist, definitively establishing the importance of social and environmental factors in mental illness.
