Richard was educated at Aberdeen University - entering in 1898, he graduated M.B. in 1903. After holding appointments at Lambeth and Tynemouth, he settled in private practice at Portsmouth, where he was appointed an Anaesthetist at the Royal Hospital. He volunteered his services on the outbreak of war in August 1914, and was appointed a Civil Surgeon at the Alexandra Hospital, Cosham. He obtained a commission as Lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. on 29th March 1915, and served with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at the Dardanelles from the following July, when he was sent out with No 14 Casualty Clearing Station. He took part in the landing at Sulva Bay on 6th August, and in the engagements which followed he attended to the wounded for 44 consecutive hours, exposed to continuous shelling from the Turkish Batteries. He then served at Sulva for three months, when he was invalided home and died at the 5th Southern General Hospital, Portsmouth after an operation necessitated by dysentery, contracted while on active service on the Peninsula. Richard was the only surviving son of Richard Gavin Brown M.B., Deputy Inspector-General, R.N. (Ret.) and Jessie Brown; and the husband of Ruth (third daughter of R A Noble of Scotby, co. Cumberland), who in 1917 was nursing at Graylingwell War Hospital, Chichester.