William Francis Drewry (10 March 1860–19 October 1934), psychiatrist, was born in Southampton County and was the son of James David Humphry Drewry and Martha Jane Francis Drewry. His first cousin, Patrick Henry Drewry, served in the House of Representatives for fifteen terms. Drewry attended a private academy in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, before studying at Randolph-Macon College from 1876 to 1880. After he received an M.D. from the Medical College of Virginia in 1884, he began practicing medicine in Southampton County. Two years later Drewry became the second assistant physician for Central Lunatic Asylum, a hospital for mentally ill African Americans that had recently been moved from Henrico County to Petersburg. He was promoted to first assistant physician in 1887.
On 1 November 1896 Drewry became superintendent of Central State Hospital, as the asylum had been renamed in 1894. During his medical studies he had developed an interest in psychology and mental illness, and he quickly began instituting important reforms at the hospital. During his first year Drewry made renovations and repairs, including adding bathrooms to buildings and eliminating outhouses. He immediately reevaluated patients and separated them in different wards according to their diagnoses.
Drewry was an early advocate of abolishing the use of restraints and sedatives, and he was one of the first to recognize mental illness as a physical illness in order to destigmatize the diagnosis. To provide better individual treatment, he eventually secured funds to construct separate facilities for patients diagnosed as psychopaths, for those judged criminally insane, and for mentally ill patients suffering from tuberculosis. Drewry also argued that patients with epilepsy should be treated apart from those who were mentally ill. Beginning in 1894 he urged the state to establish such a separate institution, which opened in 1910 as the Virginia State Epileptic Colony, in Lynchburg. He declined election as superintendent of the state's largest facility at Western State Hospital, in Staunton, and chose to remain at Central State.
While an enlightened administrator, Drewry, like many southern whites of the time, believed that slavery had provided benefits to enslaved African Americans in the form of a "simple life, the hygienic conditions, the freedom from dissipation and excitement, steady and healthful employment, enforced self restraint, the freedom from care and responsibility" and that their general stability had been eroded by emancipation. Under Drewry's guidance Central State became one of the largest psychiatric institutions for African Americans in the United States. Using a regime of daily routine and disciplined outdoor work, Central State was recognized as a model for the care of mentally ill patients.
Drewry, who had an aptitude for business and may have been looking for an increase in his $4,500 salary, resigned from the hospital on 7 January 1924 after the Petersburg city council elected him city manager, effective 1 January 1924. Under his oversight the city built a new police headquarters and a new junior high school, paved roads, constructed sidewalks, installed streetlights, and laid water and sewer lines, among other improvements. After the city council reduced his $10,000 salary by 50 percent, Drewry resigned on 6 November 1928. He became head of Virginia's Bureau of Mental Hygiene, a new division of the State Department of Public Welfare, on 22 January 1929 and moved to Richmond. As head of the bureau until his death, Drewry advocated increasing the availability of psychiatric clinics and social services for inpatients and outpatients, in prisons, and in reformatory institutions and for establishing chairs of psychiatry at the state's medical schools.
Drewry argued that the fields of medicine and mental health were closely related and predicted that physicians would have to contribute to the treatment and prevention of mental disorders. He published numerous articles on epilepsy, tuberculosis, and mental illness that significantly influenced the psychiatric field, the General Assembly, and popular perception of mental illness. Many of his articles appeared in the Virginia Medical Monthly, of which he was an associate editor from 1911 to 1917. Drewry served on the six-member committee that published a landmark history of American psychiatry in the four-volume Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada (1916–1917). Throughout his career he often served as a consultant in court cases concerning the criminally insane and on legislation regarding mental illness.
Long believing that the state had a responsibility for the mental health of its residents, Drewry, in 1900, helped organize the Virginia Conference of Charities and Corrections to raise awareness about neglected Virginians, including homeless children, juvenile delinquents, and the mentally ill, and to coordinate charitable efforts and reform measures to improve their conditions. As president of the conference in 1906, he wrote legislation that two years later created the State Board of Charities and Corrections, from which the Board of Public Welfare evolved. As president of the Medical Society of Virginia for the 1907–1908 term, Drewry urged physicians to initiate legislation calling for reforms and new agencies to regulate dubious medical practices and to improve prevention and treatment of diseases. In June 1909 he was elected to a one-year term as president of the American Medico-Psychological Association (later the American Psychiatric Association). Drewry also served as president of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics for the 1909–1910 term. He sat on the executive committee of the Virginia Society for Mental Health at its organization in 1917 and during World War I acted as the state's liaison to the War Work Committee of the National Committee for Mental Health. Drewry helped organize the Virginia Tuberculosis Association and served as its president in 1928. He sat on the State Board of Health for about ten years and from 1920 until his death served as a member of the board that advised the governor on issues of mental health.
On 20 December 1892 Drewry married Bessie Seabury, a Petersburg native. They had three daughters and one son. William Francis Drewry died at his Richmond home on 19 October 1934 of urinary and prostate disease and was buried in Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1906–1909), 5:108–111, and Arthur W. James, The State Becomes a Social Worker: An Administrative Interpretation (1942), 91–92; Marriage Register, Petersburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); publications include Drewry, "Correlation of the Physician and the Layman," Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly 13 (1908): 313–320, "The Scope of the Activities of the Alienist," American Journal of Insanity 67 (1910): 1–16, and "The Utility of Organization," National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics Transactions 7 (1911): 1–10; Petersburg Progress-Index, 10–12 Dec. 1923; Richmond News Leader, 12 Dec. 1923; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 Jan. 1929; State Department of Public Welfare Public Welfare 7 (Mar. 1929): 1–4; John S. Hughes, "Labelling and Treating Black Mental Illness in Alabama, 1861–1910," Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 444 (quotation); BVS Death Certificate, Richmond City (with birth date); obituaries in Petersburg Progress-Index, 20 Oct. 1934 (portrait), Richmond Times-Dispatch, 20, 21 Oct. 1934, Washington Post, 21 Oct. 1934, and Virginia Medical Monthly 61 (1934): 502, 541–543; editorial tributes and memorials in Petersburg Progress-Index, 21 Oct. 1934, Richmond News Leader, 23 Oct. 1934, State Department of Public Welfare Public Welfare 12 (Nov. 1934): 1–4, Virginia Medical Monthly 61 (1934): 564, and American Journal of Psychiatry 91 (1935): 957–959.
Photograph in Richmond Times Dispatch, 19 Oct. 1908.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leah M. Thomas.
How to cite this page:
Leah M. Thomas, "William Francis Drewry (1860–1934)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Drewry_William_Francis, accessed [today's date]).
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