Ivor Browne: “visionary and radical” psychiatrist

Early life and career

Browne was born in Dublin to Grace Darling (née Fitzmaurice), a Church of Ireland Protestant, and James Browne, a Catholic, who worked in a bank having served with the British navy during the first world war and taken part in the Battle of Jutland. Browne attended secondary school at Blackrock College, Dublin, then Potters College in Dún Laoghaire. As a teenager he had wanted to be a jazz musician and claimed he studied medicine only to please his parents.

In 1947, on his second attempt, Browne passed the entrance exam to the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and started his medical training—while playing jazz in his free time. As a student he contracted tuberculosis, interrupting his studies and ending his dream of becoming a professional trumpet player. After qualifying he trained for six months in a neurosurgical unit and then for a further six months in general practice, but he was not attracted to the life of a GP or a surgeon. Leonard Abrahamson, professor of medicine, told him, “You’re fit only to be an obstetrician or a psychiatrist.”

In 1956 Browne moved to the Warneford Hospital in Oxford for a year as a trainee psychiatrist, before moving to the Marlborough Day Hospital in London, where he was encouraged by Joshua Bierer, a pioneer in social psychiatry, …