Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: There is no man more Paradoxical than myself'.Four hundred years after his birth, Sir Thomas Browne (Figure 1) is remembered not for his metaphysical subtleties or scientific speculations but for his unfailing toleration in an age of sectarian strife.Thomas was the youngest of four children of a mercer, Thomas Browne, and his wife Anne Garraway.He was born in Cheapside, London, on 19 October 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot. 1 After the death of Thomas Browne senior in 1613 Anne married Sir Thomas Dutton, and this remarriage within six months of her bereavement led to intervention of the Court of Orphans of the City of London into the disposition of the will.Her dead husband's elder brother Edward had been a fellow executor but Anne had proceeded to probate in his absence, and the Court questioned her declaration that Thomas Browne had died with negligible wealth.Eventually Anne was excluded from the executorship and Edward was appointed to act alone-to the lasting benefit of the young Thomas and his four sisters. 2 Thomas at the age of 11 was sent to William of Wykeham's foundation at Winchester, and in 1623 he entered Broadgates Hall, Oxford.When he graduated BA three years later the Hall had been incorporated into the newly founded Pembroke College.After he became MA in June 1629, with his stepfather he made a brief visit to Ireland about which we know little-not altogether surprisingly, for Dutton as Scoutmaster General was sure to cover his tracks.3 In 1630 Thomas set off for the medical schools of Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, where his MD was conferred in December 1633.4 Browne began practice in Shibden [also Shipden] Dale near Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1635, the year after Dutton's death in a drunken brawl in London.5 He moved to settle in Norwich in 1637, the year his Leiden MD was incorporated at Oxford. 4 In 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham of Burlington St Peter, who eventually bore him ten children, six of whom died before their parents.In
Author: Caoimhghín S Breathnach
Institutions: University College Dublin, National University of Ireland
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2017214387