Thomas Browne - Biography

Biography

The son of a silk merchant from Upton, Cheshire, he was born in the parish of St Michael, Cheapside, in London on 19 October 1605. His father died while he was still young and he was sent to school at Winchester College. In 1623 Browne went to Oxford University. He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford in 1626 after which he studied medicine at various Continental universities, including Leiden, where he received an MD in 1633. He settled in Norwich in 1637 where he practiced medicine and lived until his death in 1682.

His first well-known work bore the Latin title Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician). This work was circulated in manuscript among his friends, and it caused Browne some surprise when an unauthorised edition appeared in 1642, since the work contained a number of religious speculations that might be considered unorthodox. An authorised text with some of the controversial matter removed appeared in 1643. The expurgation did not end the controversy; in 1645, Alexander Ross attacked Religio Medici in his Medicus Medicatus (The Doctor, Doctored) and in fact the book was placed upon the Papal index of forbidden reading for Catholics in the same year. In Religio Medici, Browne had confirmed his belief, in accordance with the vast majority of seventeenth century European society, in the existence of angels and witches. It is known that in later life he attended the 1662 Bury St. Edmunds witch trial, where his citation of a similar trial in Denmark played a negligible influence upon the jury's minds of the guilt of two accused women, who were subsequently executed for the crime of witchcraft.

In 1646, Browne published the encyclopaedia, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and commonly Presumed Truths, whose title refers to the prevalence of false beliefs and "vulgar errors." A sceptical work that debunks a number of legends circulating at the time in a paradoxical and witty manner; it displays the Baconian side of Browne—the side that was unafraid of what at the time was still called "the new learning". The book is significant in the history of science, because its arguments were some of the first to cast doubt on the widely-believed hypothesis of spontaneous generation or abiogenesis.

Browne's last publication during his lifetime (1658) were two philosophical Discourses intrinsically related to each other; the first Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, occasioned by the discovery of some Bronze Age burials in earthenware vessels found in Norfolk inspired him to meditate upon the funerary customs of the world and the fleetingness of earthly fame and reputation.

Urn-Burial's "twin" discourse is The Garden of Cyrus, or, The Quincunciall Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, and Mystically Considered, whose subject is the quincunx, the arrangement of five units like the five-spot in dice, which Browne used to demonstrate that evidence of the Platonic forms and intelligent design exist throughout Nature.