William A. F. Browne

Who was William A. F. Browne?

Dr William A. F. Browne was one of the most significant asylum doctors of the nineteenth century. At Montrose Asylum in Angus and at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries, Browne introduced activities for patients including writing, art, group activity and drama, pioneered early forms of occupational therapy and art therapy, and initiated one of the earliest collections of artistic work by patients in a psychiatric hospital. Browne may thus be counted alongside William Tuke, Philippe Pinel, Vincenzo Chiarugi and John Conolly as one of the pioneers of the moral treatment of the insane. In 1857, he was appointed Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland and, in 1866, he was elected President of the Medico-Psychological Association, now the Royal College of Psychiatrists. William Browne was the father of the eminent psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne.

Browne was the son of an army officer - Lieutenant William Browne of the Cameronian Regiment - who drowned in a troopship disaster in 1805. After this upheaval, Browne was brought up on his maternal grandparents' farm and attended Stirling High School and Edinburgh University. As a medical student, Browne became fascinated by phrenology and Lamarckian evolution, joining the Edinburgh Phrenological Society on 1 April 1824, and taking an active part in the Plinian Society with Robert Edmond Grant and Charles Darwin in 1826 and the Spring of 1827. Here, Browne presented materialist concepts of the mind as a process of the brain. Browne's amalgamation of phrenology with Lamarckian concepts of evolution anticipated - by some years - the approach of Robert Chambers in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The furious arguments which Browne engendered at the Plinian Society in 1826/1827 gave ample warning to Charles Darwin, then aged 17/18, of forthcoming controversies between science and Christian beliefs.