This biography establishes Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) as a unique subject. Browne was an English author with extensive knowledge in many fields. His book Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor) was published in 1643 and became a best-seller in Europe.
Browne’s days at Winchester are a sojourn into the halcyon realms of grammar education secure in the pastoral, educational, and demanding mentoring of his teachers. The curriculum is a pastiche of inkwells and polished desk lids banging thought into shape. Immersed in the logic, philosophy, and religion of his Oxford tutors’ tautology we see him turning to medicine. To luxuriate in Barbour’s exposition of the emergence of critical thought, and the sheer joy for Browne of his growing mindfulness, is to bathe again in the sunshine of youth.
His early footsteps into medical learning were as multi-dimensional (apothecary, the anatomy room, and religious philosophy of the disease process) as today’s evidence-based medicine is to modern medical students.
After Oxford he journeyed in 1631 to 1634 to Montpellier in France, Padua in Italy, and Leiden in the Netherlands for a broader conceptualisation of medical study coloured by the all-pervasive religious thought of the times. The lineage of medical and philosophical thought is the golden thread running through his medical training and clinical sabbaticals on the continent.
Back in the UK he lived first in Halifax to work on converting his Leiden qualifications into a doctorate to enable him to practise. He then settled in Norwich where he married, had children, and established his medical practice. This biography is a gargantuan medical biopic of War and Peace dimensions, where the phrase ‘to travel is more enjoyable than arriving’ rings true.
Browne was knighted in 1671 as an acknowledgement of his rare intellect. When Barbour ends his biography with the death of Sir Thomas Browne we are uplifted by a sang-froid that many a physician would wish to emulate. When he self-diagnosed the cause of the symptoms of his own mortal affliction, he refused all medication from the attending physicians and passed away with ‘all quietness’.
All in all, a handsome biography of a handsome mind.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2017