The flamboyant career of R.M. Bucke seems unique in Canadian medical history. He was a gold prospector who lost body parts to frostbite; he was an innovative superintendent of the London Asylum in southwestern Ontario; he was a confidant and literary executor to Walt Whitman; and he was the author of an influential book on mysticism.

Bucke’s roots trace back to England and Horace Walpole’s family, Bucke’s father being the Reverend Horatio Walpole Bucke, through whose mother the line led to Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford. When Richard was only one year old, the Bucke family emigrated to Canada for reasons unknown and settled on a homestead near the future site of the London Asylum. Here, Bucke lost both a mother and a step-mother before he was sixteen. His mother may have been worn out from delivering and caring for ten children in not much more than a decade.
 

Richard M. Bucke (1837-1902), in 1876 super intendent of Hamilton’s Asylum for the Insane (Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital) and London’s Asylum for the Insane (London Psychiatric Hospital) between 1877 and 1902, was an innovative pioneer in the treatment of the mentally ill. Ån influential mystic, his friendship with the celebrated Walt Whitman was the subject of a National Film Board of Canada co-production, Beautiful Dreamers, 1992. [Photo, courtesy Charles G. Roland]

His father had brought a voluminous library to Canada, and this became Bucke’s university. He had no formal schooling before attending McGill University, but he arrived there remarkably well educated. The home library is said to have contained several thousand volumes in seven languages.

There was, however, a substantial hiatus between his losing his stepmother in 1853 and his attending university. At age sixteen, Bucke decided to pursue the great American adventure by trekking west looking for gold. He approached this experience gradually, spending three or four years working at a wide variety of jobs in Ohio, Louisiana, and on steamboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. When he decided to cross the continent to the Pacific, he was hired on to help escort a wagon train from Fort Leavenworth to Salt Lake City.

From there the men set up groups of five or ten, bought a wagon for each group, and headed west through hostile Indian territory. They fought through to the mountains and became gold miners in the most westerly areas of Utah. Then, in 1857, Bucke set out for California to find silver.

Soon he was in serious trouble. Food ran out. He was badly frostbitten and irredeemably lost. Near death, he stumbled upon a mining camp where he recovered, but one foot and part of the other had to be amputated. The stumps would take forty years to heal completely.

He returned home at age 21 having experienced remarkable adventures paid for with part of his body. But his spirit was vigorously alive. Enabled to study medicine by means of a small legacy from his mother, he went to McGill in 1858.

After graduation and a period of study in England and Paris, Bucke returned to western Ontario in 1863 to practise general medicine throughout much of the 1860s and early 1870s. But he also made several trips to Great Britain, and on one of these he had a transcendental experience that profoundly affected his life.

In 1876 he obtained the position of superintendent at the Asylum for the Insane in Hamilton, Ontario. After a year there, he competed successfully for the similar post at the London Asylum for the Insane, recently vacated by the death of his predecessor.
 

Brought in 1838 to Upper Canada (Ontario) at age one, Richard Bucke grew up in this pioneer family farm near London, Ontario. The drawing was rendered by his father in the 1840s. [Photo, courtesy Charles G. Roland]

Bucke first read the poetry of Walt Whitman while he was a general practitioner and became exaggeratedly enthusiastic about Whitman’s qualities as a mystical poet, philosopher, and man. They met in 1877. Their names were to be connected throughout Whitman’s lifetime, and indeed still are in many ways. Bucke found his hero godlike and from this time on they corresponded frequently, with Bucke often visiting the poet in New Jersey and Whitman spending four months with the Buckes in London. Bucke grew a beard like Whitman’s and, in many photographs, can scarcely be distinguished from Whitman. Ultimately Bucke had his friend William Osler undertake the medical care of his friend.

At the London Asylum, Bucke increasingly sought to minimize the use of physical restraint that was so much a part of asylum “care” until well into the nineteenth century in both Europe and North America. At the London institute there were 900 patients, roughly half of them women; on average, about half of the patients, once admitted, stayed in the asylum longer than a decade. By 1882 Bucke had ceased to prescribe alcohol, considered by most a sheet anchor of therapy. Bucke also became a pioneer in his treatment of the mentally ill, in Canada at least, by greatly increasing the freedom of movement for most of his patients, a policy in direct opposition to tradition and convention which kept patients in physical restraint.

Several of Bucke’s books made his name widely known even though superficially they might seem directed to specific audiences. First, he published, in 1879, his psychiatric speculations in a book entitled Man’s Moral Nature. Briefly, his thesis was that moral sense in humans was mediated via the sympathetic nervous system and that this innate moral sense was becoming more common. Though it sold poorly, the book was the first Canadian monograph on psychiatry. In 1883 he followed this work with his authorized biography of Whitman, someone who, he believed, showed to a marked degree the moral sense he referred to in Man’s Moral Nature.

But most important in attempting to understand Bucke’s continued worldwide influence nearly a century after his death is his last and major opus, Cosmic Consciousness. Published in 1901 and still in print today, this has become a classic of mysticism. This volume was the logical sequel to his earlier books. In it Bucke posited a third type of consciousness among humans. There is, first, the simple consciousness of existence and, second, a higher level of self-consciousness. Bucke added a third and profoundly higher level, “cosmic consciousness,” which he believed to have been attained by only a few dozen individuals by 1901. These include Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Dante, Whitman, Francis Bacon, Blake, as well as Bucke himself. He believed that the occurrence of this special form of consciousness was increasing and attainable, eventually, by all. Whether this may turn out to be the case, only the future can tell.

Just a few months after Cosmic Consciousness appeared, Bucke fell on an icy porch, fractured his skull, and died. He had been well appreciated by his professional colleagues, who saw him elected a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada, president of national and international societies, as well as a distinguished professor at Western University in London, now the University of Western Ontario.

Charles Roland