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9 unusual facts about Thomas Browne


A Letter to a Friend

A Letter to a Friend (written 1656; published posthumously in 1690), by the 17th century philosopher and physician Sir Thomas Browne is a medical treatise of case-histories and witty speculations upon the human condition.

Deipnosophistae

The encyclopaedist Sir Thomas Browne wrote a Latin essay on Athenaeus which reflects a revived interest in the Banquet of the Learned amongst scholars following the publication of the Deipnosophistae in 1612 by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon.

Genesis flood narrative

In 1646, Sir Thomas Browne wondered why the natives of North America had taken rattlesnakes with them, but not horses: "How America abounded with Beasts of prey and noxious Animals, yet contained not in that necessary Creature, a Horse, is very strange".

Godwit

Sir Thomas Browne writing in the seventeenth century noted that godwits "were accounted the daintiest dish in England."

Musaeum Clausum

Musaeum Clausum (Latin for Sealed Museum), also known as Bibliotheca abscondita, is a tract written by Sir Thomas Browne first published posthumously in 1684.

Palingenesis

The 17th century English polymath Thomas Browne used the term describing experiments in which the ashes of incinerated plants allegedly took forms that recalled the organism they had come from.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne challenging and refuting the 'vulgar' or common errors and superstitions of his age.

Sexuality of William Shakespeare

:Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality (a notion sufficiently refuted by the sonnets themselves), we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature.

Simon Wilkin

Wilkin compiled an edition of Sir Thomas Browne (1836; reissued in 1852) for which he researched Browne's correspondence in the British Museum and Bodleian Library.


John Heydon

Heydon was accused of plagiarizing Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Vaughan, and other writers; his Physician's Guide of 1662 largely derives from Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis.

Melancholia

("Always Dowland, always mourning.") The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent," is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane." Other major melancholic authors include Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor, whose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Holy Living and Holy Dying, respectively, contain extensive meditations on death.

Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2

The lyrics of "Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)" have many references to Musaeum Clausum written by Sir Thomas Browne.


see also

Benjamin Ward Richardson

He entered Anderson's University (now University of Strathclyde), in 1847, but a severe attack of famine fever (either typhus or relapsing fever) that he caught while he was a pupil at St Andrews Lying-in Hospital (now Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital), interrupted his studies, and led him to become an assistant, first to Thomas Browne of Saffron Walden in Essex, and afterwards to Edward Dudley Hudson at Littlethorpe, Cosby, near Leicester.