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.^[1] 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^[2] has identified Browne's career with the institutional triumph of nineteenth century 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 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'....In 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

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.