Browne, Sir Thomas 1605-82
English writer and physician

He was born in London. Educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, he studied medicine, travelled in Ireland, France, and Italy, graduated as Doctor of Medicine at Leyden in the Netherlands and at Oxford, and settled in 1637 at Norwich, where he lived and practised the rest of his life. He was knighted by Charles II on his visit to Norwich in 1671. His greatest work is his earliest, the Religio Medici (c.1635, authorized edition 1643) - a sort of confession of faith, revealing a deep insight into the mysteries of the spiritual life. It was followed by Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into?Vulgar and Common Errors (1646), a discursive amalgam of humour, acuteness, learning, and credulity. In the 1650s he wrote Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658), considered to be the first archaeological treatise in English, and The Garden of Cyrus (1658), the most fantastic of Browne's writings, which aims to show that the number five pervaded not only all the horticulture of antiquity, but that it recurs throughout all plant life, as well as in the 'figurations' of animals. Posthumous publications include Christian Morals (1716), an incomplete work, intended to be a continuation of the Religio Medici.

Bibliography: F L Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (1962)