Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1605 – Norwich, 1682) was an English physician and author, often regarded as one of the most original prose writers in the English language. His works, written in the seventeenth century, mix medicine, religion, science and esoteric learning, and stand between the new Baconian science and the classical and biblical tradition. He matters because he combined an Anglican Christian faith with an open curiosity about the natural world.

He was the son of a silk merchant and lost his father while still young. He studied at Winchester College and in 1623 entered the University of Oxford, where he took his degree in the second half of the 1620s. He then travelled and studied in several parts of continental Europe, and gained his medical doctorate at Leiden in 1633. From 1637 he practised medicine in Norwich, where he lived until his death.

During the English Civil War he was hostile to the Puritans and sympathised with the royalists, and he waited for better times. His first book, Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician), appeared in an unauthorised edition in 1642 and in a revised text the following year. It is a personal reflection on faith and on himself, and it quickly drew controversy, to the point that the Catholic Church placed it on the Index of prohibited books.

His most systematic work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, published in 1646, examines with method and wit the false beliefs of his age, which he called vulgar errors. Here the Baconian side of Browne appears, ready to test popular legends. At the end of his life he wrote two companion discourses. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658) grew out of the discovery of burial urns in Norfolk and is a meditation on death and the fragility of fame. The Garden of Cyrus (1658) studies the quincunx as a trace of Platonic forms in art and nature.

He believed in angels and witchcraft, and attended a witch trial in 1662. In 1671, during a visit by Charles II to Norwich, he was knighted on the proposal of the mayor, who had declined the honour himself. He died on the day he turned 77. His posthumous works, such as Christian Morals, appeared decades after his death. Jorge Luis Borges called him the “greatest prose writer in the English language”, and he is also remembered for the large number of words he introduced into English.