William Alexander Francis Browne was born in 1805 and was an early advocate of the humane psychiatric treatment of people suffering from mental illness. He was fascinated by and also an advocate of Phrenology, which states that the mind is the outcome of the material properties of the
brain and involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. Although phrenology has been declared a pseudoscience in today’s day and age, this practice helped publicize the idea that the brain has different parts with specialized functions.
At Montrose Asylum (1834–1838) in Angus and at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries (1838–1857), where Browne was appointed as the medical superintended, he 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 1832-1834, Browne published a paper where he advocated that the mental illness has a material basis as a fault of the brain, not of the mind itself.
Browne made remarkable contributions to the treatment of the mentally ill throughout his career. He suggested that the higher incidence of mental illness among women during that era was the result of poorer education and inequalities. Browne gave frequent lectures on the reform of mental
institutions. In 1837 his lectures were published with the title What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be, and set out his ideas of the ideal asylum of the future.
