William A. F. Browne

Dr William Alexander Francis Browne (1805–1885) was one of the most significant British asylum doctors of the nineteenth century. At Montrose Asylum (1834–1838) in Angus and at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries (1838–1857), Browne introduced activities for patients including writing, 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. In an age which rewarded self-control, Browne encouraged self-expression and may therefore be counted alongside William Tuke, Vincenzo Chiarugi and John Conolly as one of the pioneers of the moral treatment of mental illness. Sociologist Andrew Scull has identified Browne's career with the institutional triumph of nineteenth century psychiatry.

In 1857, Browne 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. He was the father of the eminent psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne.

Browne's enthusiasm for phrenology convinced him that mind and consciousness were aspects of brain activity.

Early life

Browne was the son of an army officer – Lieutenant William Browne of the Cameronian Regiment – who drowned in a troopship disaster (the Aurora on the Goodwin Sands) in December 1805. After this upheaval, Browne was brought up on his maternal grandparents' farm at Polmaise, near Stirling, attending Stirling High School and Edinburgh University. As a medical student, Browne was 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 (1844). The furious arguments which Browne provoked at the Plinian Society in 1826/1827 gave ample warning to Charles Darwin, then aged 17/18, of the growing tensions between science and religious beliefs.

Browne presented Plinian papers on various subjects, including plants he had collected, the habits of the cuckoo, the aurora borealis, and ghosts. On 21 November 1826, he proposed Charles Darwin for membership of the Plinian Society. On the same evening, Browne announced a paper which he presented in December 1826, contesting Charles Bell's Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. Bell, the son of a clergyman and an enormously influential neurologist, claimed, in line with the principles of natural theology, that the Creator had endowed human beings with a unique facial musculature which enabled them to express their higher moral nature in a way which was impossible in animals. Bell's aphorism on the subject was:

Browne argued that these anatomical differences were lacking and that such essential differences between human beings and animals did not exist. Forty-five years later, Darwin pursued an identical argument in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), confiding in Alfred Russel Wallace that one of his main purposes was to discredit the slippery rhetoric of Sir Charles Bell.

Later, at a Plinian meeting on 27 March 1827, Browne followed Darwin's paper on marine invertebrates and Dr Robert Edmund Grant's exposition on sea-mats with a presentation that mind and consciousness were simply aspects of brain activity. This programme of three papers presented an ascending view of life's complexities from the marine invertebrates beloved of Grant to the ultimate mysteries of human consciousness, all on a scientific platform of evolutionary development. In addition, Browne appeared to present a view of the world which was politically and morally at odds with the opinions of the educational establishment. A furious debate ensued, and subsequently someone (probably the crypto-Lamarckian Robert Jameson, Regius Professor of Natural History) took the extraordinary step of deleting the minutes of this heretical part of the discussion. The deletion, however, was incomplete and has allowed a final restoration of the proceedings. The extreme impact of these events is indicated by the fact that a friend of Browne's – John Coldstream – developed an emotional disturbance which his doctor attributed to his being

After graduating at Edinburgh, Browne travelled to Paris and studied psychiatry with Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol Browne gave frequent lectures on the reform of mental institutions, often expressing himself in surprisingly political/reformist terms – like a sociological visionary. In 1837, five lectures he had delivered before the Managers of Montrose Lunatic Asylum were published under the title What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be, setting out his ideas of the ideal asylum of the future and, in many ways, Browne sought to arrest – or even to reverse – the social consequences of the widespread industrialisation which had disrupted the Scottish culture of his childhood.

In this influential book, Browne challenged the contemporary perception that insanity was a simple consequence of the social upheavals consequent upon the Industrial Revolution – and claimed that insanity was increasing because

In some ways, Browne anticipated the French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel whose clinical theories of degeneration were published in his 1857 masterpiece Treatise on Degeneration. Browne – rather surprisingly – supported the idea that insanity was most prevalent amongst the highest rank of society and he concluded that "the agricultural population..... is to a great degree exempt from insanity". He speculated that insanity was common in America because

He also suggested that the higher incidence of mental illness amongst women was the result of inequalities and poorer education. Here he encouraged his patients with writing, art and drama and a host of other activities, long anticipating the clinical approaches of occupational therapy and art therapy. He made regular records of his patients' dreams, and of their social activities and groupings. Elizabeth Crichton would have monthly meetings with him. In 1855, the Crichton was visited by the celebrated American reformer Dorothea Dix and she seems to have struck up a positive relationship with Magdalene Browne, taking an interest in her traditional Scottish cuisine, before moving on to her Edinburgh friends, Mr and Mrs Robert Chambers. Browne remained at the Crichton until 1857 when his outstanding reputation resulted in his appointment as the first Medical Commissioner to the Scottish asylums. In 1861 he was elected a member of the Harveian Society of Edinburgh. In 1866, he was elected President of the Medico-Psychological Association, and he used his Presidential Address as an opportunity to spell out (at considerable length) his concepts of medical psychology.

In 1870, while visiting asylums in East Lothian, Browne was involved in a road accident which resulted in his resignation as Commissioner in Lunacy, and, later, in increasing problems with his eyesight. He may have been suffering some ophthalmic problems, probably glaucoma, from years earlier. Browne retired to his home in Dumfries and worked on a series of medico-literary projects, including the Religio Psycho-Medici (1877) in which he re-explored the territories of psychopathology and the spiritual outlook.

Towards the end of his career, Browne returned to the relationships of language, psychosis and brain injury in his 1872 paper Impairment of Language, the Result of Cerebral Disease published in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, edited by his son James Crichton-Browne. At this time, Crichton-Browne was concluding a lengthy correspondence with Charles Darwin during the preparation and publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

In 1839, Browne had initiated one of the first collections of art by mental patients in institutions, gathering a large amount of work which he had bound into three volumes, in many ways a forerunner to Hans Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill and the academic study of outsider art (art brut). A paper by Browne on Mad Artists was published in 1880 in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, setting out his views on mental illness and the effect it had on established artists. Browne's last years were clouded by the death of his wife in January 1882 and by his increasing blindness; but he lived to hear of his son's achievements in medical psychology rewarded by his election – in 1883 – as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

W.A.F. Browne's legacy

Universally regarded as a superb asylum superintendent and as a distinguished President of the Medico-Psychological Association (1866), Browne's reputation rested substantially on his achievements as an asylum reformer – with acute responsiveness to the psychological lives of his patients. Browne's early writings on asylum management – including his celebrated What Asylums Were, Are and Ought To Be – brought him international recognition, with honorary doctorates from Heidelberg and Wisconsin. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Browne is now considered as an important influence – along with Robert Grant – on the youthful Charles Darwin as a medical student in Edinburgh in 1826/1827. In December 1826, Browne delivered an inflammatory harangue to the Plinian Society concerning emotional expression – contesting the doctrines of Charles Bell. On 27 March 1827, Browne spelled out the full implications of a materialistic theory of the mind at the Plinian Society – and the 18-year-old Charles Darwin was there to hear on both occasions. In this way, Browne was a pivotal figure in the mutual engagement of psychiatry and evolutionary theory. Browne's son, James Crichton Browne, greatly extended his work in psychiatry and medical psychology. In his correspondence with Crichton-Browne, Charles Darwin suggested – during the preparation of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – that it should be regarded as "by Darwin and Browne?".