Thomas Browne

Background

Thomas Browne was born in Cheapside, London, on October 19, 1605. Browne’s father, Thomas, had come in early manhood from Chester to London, where he was a mercer, or silk merchant. There he married Anne Garroway of Acton, Middlesex. They lived in comfortable circumstances with their son and four daughters.

Education

The elder Browne left a generous inheritance, however, which supported his son in his extensive education in England and abroad. Thomas entered Winchester College in 1616, where he studied classics and rhetoric and absorbed the Anglican and Royalist spirit of the place. He went on to Oxford in 1623, where his classical education was broadened and supplemented by training in the natural sciences. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1626 and his Master of Arts in 1629.

Following graduation, having been inspired to become a physician, he departed for the Continent to seek the superior medical training available there. He went first to the University of Montpellier and then to Padua, where, a century before, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) had revolutionized the study of anatomy, where, twenty years earlier, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had first trained his telescope on the stars, and where William Harvey (1578–1657) had studied prior to his recent discovery of the circulation of the blood. Browne imbibed the unparalleled clinical instruction offered at Padua but soon moved on to Leiden for further study and obtained his Doctor of Medicine there in 1633. After an apprenticeship in England, he acquired a Doctor of Medicine from Oxford and in 1637.

Career

Browne's era was one of great political and religious unrest and scientific ferment. His first and most famous written work, Religio Medici (The religion of a doctor), appeared in 1642 at the onset of the English Civil War, or Puritan Revolution. In this work, Browne offers a candid exploration of his elastic Anglican views, shaped by a mixture of traditional and contemporary ideas, regarding such issues as God's relation to nature, the interplay of faith and reason, and the conciliatory effects of Christian charity and humility. Browne envisioned human beings as microcosms of the universe, and Religio Medici itself can be seen as an epitome of its author, embodying his religious background, his classical and scientific education, and his humane tolerance acquired from wide experience of diverse national and religious cultures. Aside from its content, the poetic literary quality of the book, which displays a musical sensibility striking resonant chords along a scale between certitude and doubt, has long-established Browne as one of the finest prose stylists in the history of English literature.

In addition to becoming a respected physician through decades of practice in Norwich, Browne was a recognized authority on the flora and fauna of East Anglia. He was intent on sorting out truth from error in natural history and general knowledge and in 1646 published his systematic inquiry into contemporary beliefs called Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which became commonly known as Vulgar Errors. In the spirit of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Browne assayed hundreds of presumed truths about the world, often utilizing the newly ascendant intellectual instruments of empirical observation and experimentation. This book, which was his longest, enjoyed great popularity and, like other works appearing near the dawn of modern science, helped foster critical and constructive modes of thought among its wide audience. Browne conducted diverse scientific investigations, was in contact with many leading scientific figures of his day, and was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, but he remained on the margins of the scientific community of seventeenth-century England and never became a fellow of the Royal Society.

Browne's other important literary and philosophical works include the companion essays Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, which were published together in 1658. The first, which displays his antiquarian interests, is a meditation on death and decay prompted by the unearthing of ancient burial urns near Norwich. The second is an exploration of the "mystical mathematics" of the number five manifested in human designs and botanical life and reveals Browne's abiding Platonic belief that the visible world is but an image of an invisible order. He thought that the quintessence of human identity lies in living a sort of amphibious existence traversing those two worlds, and he tried passionately, in an age of shifting religious and scientific worldviews, to keep the two together.

Achievements

• 

  Sir Thomas Browne is in large part inquiries into religion, morality, science, and human error. A doctor and scholar, he is remembered for Religio medici, which is marked by his masterly prose style.
  
  Browne appears at No. 69 in the Oxford English Dictionary's list of top-cited sources. He has 775 entries in the OED of the first usage of a word, is quoted in a total of 4131 entries of the first evidence of a word, and is quoted 1596 times as first evidence of a particular meaning of a word.
  
  Browne was knighted by Charles II in 1671 as an honor for Norwich's most distinguished citizen. Fittingly for a man whose favorite sacred symbol was the circle, Browne's life came to a close on the date of his birth in 1682.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Religio Medici: The Religion of a Doctor

    (Religio Medici The Religion of a Doctor Sir Thomas Browne...)

    1643
  • Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries Into Commonly Presumed Truths 1646
  • The garden of Cyrus 1658
  • Christian Morals 1670

• Other Work

  • Hydriotaphia 1658

Religion

Thomas Browne was a devout Christian, a promoter of the new inductive science and adherent of ancient esoteric learning. For these reasons, one literary critic succinctly assessed him as "an instance of scientific reason lit up by mysticism in the Church of England."

He believed in predestination, but likes some of the rituals of the Catholic Church; he fulminates against religious bigotry and persecution but is not a great admirer of martyrs.

Politics

Browne had always been a Royalist.

Views

Browne has a mind that loves going a little beyond common sense and reason, venturing often into the realms of the fantastic, the mysterious and the unexplainable. He is one of those people who can find something of interest in just about anything, and the whole work breathes geniality, toleration, and an intelligent skepticism about the world he lives in.

Quotations: "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us."

"I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Archilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me."

"Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us."

"We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases."

"By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also."

"Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner."

"No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer."

"I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge; I intend no Monopoly, but a community, in learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves."

"With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but 'tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it."

"If there be any among those common objects of hatred which I can safely say I doe contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra; it is no breach of Charity to call these fooles; it is the stile all holy Writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonicall Scripture, and a point of our faith to beleeve so."

"The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity' something quite different, relating to the planet's life-span, not individual life-span."

"I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and beauty; there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein, notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty."

"Were every one employed in points concordant to their natures, professions, and arts, commonwealths would rise up of themselves."

"But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration."

"Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and as it were, his owne executioner."

Personality

Thomas Browne has won ever-increasing respect as a man of virtuous life dedicated to the progress of medicine and scientific experimentation and to appreciation of the mysteries of God, man, and nature. He is esteemed for a style rich in tone, exquisite in prose poetry, and superbly flexible in rhetoric.

Quotes from others about the person

• "His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and, in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express, in many words, that idea for which any language could supply a single term." - Samuel Johnson

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Francis Bacon, Kepler, Paracelsus, Montaigne, Athanasius Kircher, Della Porta, Fortunio Liceti, Arthur Dee

Connections

Browne married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and they had twelve children, only six of whom survived into adulthood.

Wife:

Lady Dorothy Browne (née Mileham)

Son:

Edward Browne

1644 - 1708

Acquaintance:

John Evelyn

John Evelyn was an English writer, gardener, and diarist.

Acquaintance:

William Dugdale

Sir William Dugdale was an English antiquary and herald. As a scholar, he was influential in the development of medieval history as an academic subject.

Acquaintance:

John Aubrey

John Aubrey was an English antiquary, natural philosopher, and writer.

References

• Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor's Life of Science and Faith
• The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne
• Sir Thomas Browne: 'A Man of Achievement in Literature'