White, Francis (1787–1859), medical doctor and first inspector general of asylums for the mentally ill in Ireland, was born in Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, son of Francis White of Carrickbeg, Co. Waterford, and Anne White (née Lee). Moving to Dublin, he was indentured (17 March 1807) to the distinguished Abraham Colles (qv), surgeon at Dr Steevens’ Hospital and past president of the RCSI. White became both a resident pupil at Dr Steevens’ and a student of the RCSI school. On 19 January 1813 he received the licentiate of the college and was elected a member 1 May 1815. He specialised in ocular surgery and on 14 June 1819 established St Mary's Hospital and Dublin Eye and Ear Infirmary at 36 Lower Ormond Quay, north-west of the Wellington (‘Ha'penny’) bridge. In 1821 he added a small school of anatomy, where he and Dr Andrew Ellis (who initiated the venture) taught surgery and physiology. White lectured with special emphasis on eye diseases. He closed the Ormond Quay premises in 1826 when Ellis left to join Dr John Timothy Kirby's Peter St. hospital school.
White wrote surgical papers about this time on topics including tracheotomy and uterine rupture. He was for several years secretary to the general board of health (established 1820), which met on Dawson St. in Dublin. He also held one of the first six administrative posts of censor at the RCSI. In 1831 he proposed the establishment (seconded by Kirby) of a surgical teaching hospital under the College's control. His aim was achieved in 1832, with the purchase of a building on Baggot St., which became the (Royal) City of Dublin Hospital. This happened only after much difficulty concerning legality and appointments, and the dissolution of the steering committee itself, of which both White and Kirby were members. While they are not listed among the hospital's founders, their central role is self-evident. White was more concerned in 1832–3 with reporting for the Mansion House relief committee on the unprecedented cholera epidemic (the so-called ‘miasma’) which swept Ireland (and Britain) and lingered into the mid 1830s. In January 1836 he was elected president of the College of Surgeons (where five years later he initiated the first professorship of hygiene in Britain or Ireland). Almost simultaneously he became surgeon to the Richmond asylum, Ireland's earliest public institution (opened in 1815) for care of the mentally ill, but whose ultimate authority was Dublin Castle, echoing the historic assumption that insanity was a moral and therefore, by extension, criminal matter. White observed limited progress in treating ‘lunatics’ as true patients, in spite of pioneering legislation such as the act of 1817 that included the Richmond in a system of ‘district asylums’. He was not the first to emphasise the medical nature of insanity but took a more proactive approach in relieving its darkest horrors, not least the overcrowded and punitive ambience that added discomfort to misery.
In the early 1840s he criticised the practice of including district asylums in the remit of the inspectors of prisons, considering it ineffective in matters where specialised knowledge and attention were required. When one of the two inspectors, Maj. Benjamin Woodward, died in 1841, White was appointed as his replacement. His views began to take effect: in 1842 private asylums were regulated by law and in 1843 a parliamentary committee, acting on his advice, drafted new rules for the regulation and management of district asylums. White's prison jurisdiction (with his colleague Maj. James Palmer) was legally extended to include asylums. He worked tirelessly on his brief and influenced the sympathetic lord chancellor of Ireland, Sir Edward Sugden (qv), in reforming the legislation to establish a separate 'inspectorate of lunatics' by an act of August 1845. On 1 January 1846 White was appointed the first of two inspectors in Ireland, a post he retained until 1857. He was joined in 1847 by John Nugent (qv), a medical graduate of TCD, thus indicating greater official recognition of medical authority over asylums as hospitals for the insane. However, Nugent's more compliant, bureaucratic style was ill-matched to White's independent, reforming spirit; nor had he White's experience with mental illness.
As long as White remained in place, reform and medical management of asylums improved apace, nursing staff were employed more readily if they lacked work experience in prisons, keepers received basic training, and patients could avail themselves of outdoor or workshop employment and useful recreation. Within a year of taking office, White reformed his own thinking in regard to many ‘incurable lunatics’, recognising what later generations identified as the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Accordingly, he presented Dublin Castle with credible cases for release, although sometimes without success. He was a truly caring reformer and administrator ahead of his time. He extended this approach to include Dublin's new Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Dundrum (established by an act of 1845), where he ensured at least a measure of medical as opposed to punitive treatment of inmates. White's concern for those in his charge evidently transcended that of most asylum governors, and by the late 1850s medical authority had largely replaced disciplinary regimes.
His limited private life included two marriages (undated), first to Catherine Rogers and secondly to Maria Kent. He had several children, two of whom (a son, Piers, who became a leading QC, and a daughter, Anne, who married Laurence Waldron, lawyer and MP for Co. Tipperary 1857–65) survived him. His last years were unhappy: after suffering severe injuries in a railway accident at Dunkit near Waterford in 1857, he was forced to retire (succeeded by Nugent as first inspector). He died 16 August 1859 in Dublin after a protracted illness, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. Nugent and his new fellow inspector, George Hatchell, did little to advance White's progressive treatment of insanity, preferring to mark time over three decades of Castle bureaucracy and patronage (including the appointment of two of Hatchell's sons as superintendents of district asylums) until their retirement in 1889. White's pioneering work on behalf of the mentally ill gradually regained currency in the 1890s. An early portrait of him by John Comerford (qv) is included among the art collection of the RCSI at St Stephen's Green, Dublin.