Lloyd Vernon Briggs

• L. Vernon Briggs
• Born: August 13, 1863
• Died: February 28, 1941

Mental-health reformer and psychiatrist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Briggs was the youngest of three children and the only son of Lloyd Briggs, a bank clerk and notary, and Sarah Elizabeth Elmes (Kent) Briggs of Scituate. Massachusetts. His ancestors had settled in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. In 1869 the family moved to Hanover, Massachusetts, a North River town known for its shipbuilding. Briggs attented Broad Oak School and Hanover Academy; he was graduated from Rice Grammar School of Boston in 1879.

While still a small boy, Briggs became interested in medicine. After preparatory work at Boston’s Chauncy Hall School and before he was sixteen, Briggs qualified for admission to Harvard Medical School but was not accepted because he was too young. His doctor, Henry I. Bowditch, the noted public health reformer, intervened, and Briggs was allowed to attend lectures so that he might gain advanced standing at the school in the future.

In spring 1880 Briggs was diagnosed as having tuberculosis and was advised to take a long sea voyage. On July 17 he set sail around Cape Horn, Chile, to Honolulu, Hawaii. After arriving he assisted in a vaccination drive during an epidemic of smallpox. The strenuous campaign delayed his own recovery; on a physician’s advice, he left for California. There he took on work as a medical assistant, for a time serving in a private hospital for mental patients.

Briggs went back to Boston in 1882. There he lived and worked with Dr. Bowditch, again attending lectures at Harvard Medical School and clinics at Massachusetts General Hospital. For a time, however, Briggs heeded his father’s warning that a physician’s life was too strenuous. Taking a position as a messenger in the Maverick National Bank, he worked his way up to become a teller.

In 1894 Briggs tried to resume his studies, but after a year’s work at Tufts College Medical School, he dropped out for health reasons. In 1895 he enlisted in the army, serving for three years. Briggs completed his third year of medical studies in 1898 at Dartmouth College Medical School, but, requiring a milder climate, later that year he transferred to George Washington Medical School in Washington, D.C. He obtained an M.D. in 1899 from the Medical College of Virginia. In 1902 he was elected a fellow of the American Medical Association.

Two areas of medicine interested Briggs. One was the treatment of tuberculosis. The second would become his most enduring legacy—his work in the study of mental disease. Little research was then being carried on in the United States into the nature of psychiatric disorders and their treatment. Patients were often involuntarily committed to institutions for life, where they were subject to physical abuse and restraint. Some individuals, especially nurses, had spoken out against these cruelties. But their protests had been ignored by the medical establishment and attacked by private mental-hospital owners, who seemed more interested in a steady flow of income from a permanent hospital population than in the cure and release of patients.

Briggs married Mary Tileston Cabot on June 1, 1905. Her family wealth insured him a degree of financial independence. Immediately after the marriage, they went to Europe where Briggs studied the treatment of mental patients in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. In 1907 he was elected a member of the American Medico-Psychological Association (later the American Psychiatric Association).

In May 1908 Briggs drafted a bill calling for the state control of Boston Insane Hospital. He prepared another bill in 1910 that created an observation hospital for mentally ill vagrants who had been sent to prison (“Tombs”) before commitment to a mental hospital. The next year he introduced a measure in the Massachusetts legislature that abolished restraint and seclusion in public as well as private mental hospitals, except in cases of active homicidal, suicidal, or infectious conditions, and then only on the express request of the physician or superintendent in charge.

The year 1911 also saw legislative passage of a Briggs proposal that required instruction for nurses in occupational therapy; but since no funds were allocated for the creation of effective occupational therapy service, it remained for a grant from Mary Briggs to make a demonstration program possible.

Briggs helped push forward the reorganization of the Massachusetts State Board of Insanity into an agency with three paid members and advanced a measure providing for yearly relicensing and reinspection of private mental institutions, in 1914. For this, Briggs was bitterly attacked by private hospitals and by some members of the Cabot family. Bylaws were introduced by the board mandating prior course work in psychiatry or experience in the treatment of the mentally ill for all hospital personnel. Hospitals were to report and explain to the board all assaults, injuries, and sudden deaths. The board established outpatient mental clinics and introduced lectures to assist the police in handling cases involving mental illness and alcoholism. On June 1, 1916, the Massachusetts legislature replaced the State Board of Insanity with a Commission on Mental Diseases, which had a paid director and four associate members. Briggs decided not to apply for the directorship.

During World War I, in July 1917, Briggs began work as an army neurosurgeon. In that capacity he helped shell-shock victims who were being threatened with prosecution for desertion.

Briggs was responsible, in 1921, for an act making psychiatric examinations mandatory for those seeking Massachusetts medical licenses. In that same year the so-called Briggs law passed the state legislature, providing for pretrial mental examinations of all those charged with capital offenses or second felonies.

He later became involved in campaigns against industrial air contamination and for the abolition of the death penalty. A Massachusetts Division of Smoke Inspection was established in 1930; Briggs was appointed to an advisory council. In 1934 he became a member of the Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. He published two books relating to these subjects: Smoke Abatement (1941) and Capital Punishment Not a Deterrent (1940).

Briggs died, at seventy-seven years old, of a coronary thrombosis while he was in Tucson, Arizona. He left a widow and their one son, Lloyd Cabot Briggs.

Among Briggs’s works not previously mentioned are Two Years’ Service on the Reorganized State Board of Insanity in Massachusetts (1930); The Manner of Man That Kills (1921); History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family, 1475-1927 (1927); California and the West, 1881 and Later (1931); Experiences of a Medical Student in Honolulu and on the Island of Oahu, 1881 (1926); Occupation as a Substitute for Restraint in the Treatment of the Mentally Ill (1923); History of the Psychopathic Hospital (1922); History and Genealogy of the Briggs Family (1938). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973) and Who Was Who in America (1942). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, March 1, 1941.