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 language all-too-revelatory of the political issues at stake, [Browne] denounced 'he who refuses the aid of medicine....as he who doubts the efficacy of moral agents'....ln the final analysis, one might abandon the millenarian expectations on which Victorian asylumdom had been mistakenly constructed - but not betray one's commitment to the medical monopolization of the treatment of the mad...." Andrew Scull (1991) The Asylum As Utopia: W A F Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry "Browne was one of the reformers of the asylum care of the insane whose improvements and innovations were chronicled in his annual reports from The Crichton Royal Institution, but who in addition published almost on the threshold of his career a sort of manifesto of what he wished to see accomplished...." Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (1963) Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860, page 865. 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.
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.
Student atheism and radicalism "Mr Browne then read his paper on organization as connected with Life and Mind in which he endeavoured to establish the following propositions: 1. That all matter is organised. 2. That it is the gradually increased perfection in the arrangement of the parts constituting organization, which is the ?cause /?source of the distinctions perceptible in the various objects of nature, and not specific differences. 3. That life is the abstract of the qualities inherent in these modes of arranging matter. 4. That mind is to be distinguished from life, being neither one of the functions or combination of qualities, by the concatenation of which life is constituted – nor a term indicating a similar idea. And 5. That mind as far as one individual sense, and consciousness are concerned, is material." The Deleted Minutes, The Plinian Society, Edinburgh, 27 March 1827. Suppressed, probably by Robert Jameson, Regius Professor of Natural History. First quoted by Paul H. Barrett (1974, 1980) (in) Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind – early writings of Charles Darwin London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 219. "Browne, the fiery radical, gave such an inflammatory harangue on matter and mind that it sparked a raging debate. He provoked the students by arguing that mind and consciousness are not spiritual entities, separate from the body; they are simple spin-offs from brain activity. Such a notion raised dreadful questions...." Adrian Desmond and James Moore (1991) Darwin. As a medical student, Browne was a Radical and an atheist, welcoming the changes in revolutionary France, and supporting democratic reform to overturn the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. In addition, Browne was an outspoken advocate of phrenology which George and Andrew Combe had developed into a form of philosophical materialism, asserting that the mind was an outcome of material properties of the brain. Through phrenological meetings, Browne became acquainted with a remarkable group of secular and interdisciplinary thinkers, including Hewett Cottrell Watson (an evolutionary thinker and friend of Charles Darwin), William Ballantyne Hodgson and Robert Chambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. His interest in natural history led to his membership of the Plinian Society, where he took part in vigorous debates concerning phrenology and early evolutionary theories and became one of the five joint presidents of this student club. The leader of the phrenologists, George Combe, toasted Browne for his success in popularising phrenology with other medical students. 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:
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