Madelaine Ray Brown

Career

Madelaine Ray Brown was a neurologist and medical researcher affiliated with several Boston-area institutions, including Cushing Veterans Hospital, New England Hospital for Women and Children, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston City Hospital, and Tufts Medical School. She led the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology as its president. In 1954, the New York Infirmary gave her an Elizabeth Blackwell Award for outstanding scientific work, and three years later the American Medical Women's Association named her Medical Woman of the Year.

She helped found the Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation. Outside medicine, Brown collected antique pewter, favoring pieces from Rhode Island, and served as a charter member and treasurer of the Pewter Collectors' Club of America. She lent several items to a 1939 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on American pewter.

Publications

Brown's work appeared in major medical and scientific journals, including Science, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, the Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Medical Clinics of North America, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her first known paper, from 1933, examined how removing the sympathetic chains and coeliac ganglia affected gastric acidity. The following year she published a study on gastrointestinal tract pathology in pernicious anemia and subacute combined degeneration of the spinal cord.

In 1937 she wrote about medical treatment for Ménière's syndrome. A 1938 paper investigated the original case of Landry's acute ascending paralysis. With Tracy J. Putnam she co-authored a 1939 article on remissions in multiple sclerosis. Alongside John H. Talbott, she published a 1940 study on acid-base blood constituents and potassium chloride treatment for Ménière's syndrome.

An evaluation of alcoholic polyneuritis treatment at Boston City Hospital from 1920 through 1938 appeared in 1941. In 1944, with James H. Currens and John F. Marchand, she reported on muscular paralysis and electrocardiographic abnormalities from potassium loss in chronic nephritis. A 1947 paper with James Hastings explored arsenic's role in alcoholic polyneuritis. She published on paroxysmal cerebral dysrhythmia after large potassium chloride doses in 1948.

Heredity in labyrinthine deafness and paroxysmal vertigo (Ménière's syndrome) was the subject of a 1949 article. A 1951 paper classified and treated headache. That same year she studied the incidence and heredity of muscular dystrophy in seventy-one Massachusetts General Hospital patients. Her final listed work, from 1952, examined the mechanism of polyneuritis using postdiphtheric polyneuritis as an example.

Personal life

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1920s, Brown’s health by the 1950s made conference travel difficult. She kept teaching, seeing patients, and researching from a wheelchair that a 1957 profile called “her freedom from immobility since 1954.” She relied on an adapted telephone and a hydraulic lift. Brown died in a 1968 car crash. Her pewter collection went to the Newport Historical Society and the Rhode Island Historical Society.