William A. F. Browne

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[3] 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.

[6] 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.

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 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 "troubled with doubts arising from certain Materialist views which are, alas, all too common among medical students.

Charles Darwin to James Crichton Browne, concerning the composition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).Browne became a physician at Stirling in 1830, and gave lectures on physiology and zoology at the Edinburgh Association which was formed in 1832 by the town's tradesmen.

In 1832–1834, Browne published a lengthy paper in the Phrenological Journal concerning the relationship of language to mental disorder and in 1834 he was appointed superintendent of Montrose Lunatic Asylum.

The sun and air are allowed to enter at every window, the view of the shrubberies and fields, and groups of labourers, is unobstructed by shutters or bars; all is clean, quiet and attractive.

The house and all around appears a hive of industry"....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 "the mind is roused to exertion without being disciplined, it is stimulated without being strengthened; because our selfish propensities are cultivated while our moral nature is left barren, our pleasures becoming poisonous; and because in the midst of a blaze of scientific light, and in the presence of a thousand temptations to multiply our immediate by a sacrifice of our ultimate gratifications, we remain in the darkest ignorance of our own mind."

[4] "....Browne persisted, even insisting on the first lighting of the Montrose asylum with gas in 1836, an event which prompted the assembly of a crowd at the gate to witness and perhaps to enjoy the conflagration which was expected inevitably to follow....

[14] 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.

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.

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.

[1][9] 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.