The Norwich doctor who gave English words like computer, electricity and hallucination
Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century physician in Norwich, is credited in the Oxford English Dictionary with 775 first uses of words. His coinages include ambidextrous, carnivorous, computer, cryptography, electricity, hallucination and prairie. Jorge Luis Borges called him the best prose writer in the English language.
Browne was born in London in 1605, the son of a silk merchant. After Winchester and Oxford he studied medicine at Padua and Montpellier and took his degree at Leiden in 1633. From 1637 he practised as a doctor in Norwich for the rest of his life. He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and six of their 10 children died before their parents.
His first book, Religio Medici, or The Religion of a Physician, appeared in an unauthorised edition in 1642 that included some unorthodox religious musings. He issued a toned-down version a year later, but the Vatican still placed it on its list of banned books. In 1646 came Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a witty, methodical demolition of the popular myths of his day that showed his enthusiasm for the new experimental science. In 1658 the discovery of dozens of Anglo-Saxon burial urns in Norfolk inspired Urn Burial, a meditation on death and how quickly fame fades.
He was also a man of contradictions. Browne believed in angels and witchcraft, and at a 1662 witch trial in Bury St Edmunds his citing of a Danish case may have swayed the jury against two women who were convicted. When Charles II visited Norwich in 1671, the mayor turned down a knighthood and suggested Browne instead. A visiting courtier described his house and garden as a paradise and cabinet of rarities, packed with medals, books, plants and natural curiosities.
Browne died on his 77th birthday in 1682. Workmen accidentally opened his coffin in 1840, and his skull was taken; it was not reburied until 1922, when the register recorded its age as 317 years. His coffin plate, stolen at the same time, joked in Latin that the dust of his alchemical body turns lead into gold. Admirers have ranged from Coleridge and Charles Lamb to Virginia Woolf, who said those who love his writing are the salt of the earth.
Source: Thomas Browne
