Book Review: Gavin Francis on Sir Thomas Browne

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

When I founded this blog back in 2012, it was with the principal aim of challenging misconceptions and taking a closer look at some of the things we commonly take for granted about literature, language, and myths. But the desire to debunk misconceptions is probably as ancient an impulse as writing itself, and perhaps even older. Now, in the 21^st century with so much information – and misinformation – all around us, that desire has become a necessary requirement.

In the seventeenth century, perhaps the greatest debunker was Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), described in the blurb to this new book-length exploration of Browne’s work as an ‘English physician, wordsmith, and polymath who contributed hundreds of words to the English language (such as medical, electricity, migrant, and computer).’

Browne studied medicine in Europe before settling in Norwich, where he practised as a doctor but also wrote books – aimed at a popular, non-specialist readership – on not only medicine (Religio Medici) but also some of the common errors and misconceptions which abound in the world of natural history and the sciences more widely (his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or ‘Vulgar Errors’).

The author of this new ‘study’ of Browne is Gavin Francis, who, like Browne, is a practising doctor. I say ‘study’, but although this book is published by a well-known academic publisher, Oxford University Press, it’s part of the OUP’s recent My Reading series, in which enthusiasts recommend a particular writer or book to us by exploring what that author or text has personally meant to them. So this is no dry academic study (this reviewer writes, from his dry academic study at home), but rather a passionate and infectiously enthusiastic rallying cry for Sir Thomas Browne’s continued importance as a writer and thinker.

In a move that seems itself to pay homage to Browne, that great originator and populariser of dozens of now-ubiquitous words, Francis structures his book around eight key words: Ambiguity, Curiosity, Vitality, Piety, Humility, Misogyny, Mobility, and Mortality. He bookends these eight chapters with two letters addressed personally to Browne himself.

Francis’ opening letter to his subject, in which he quotes Browne’s memorable phrase about seeking to write a ‘cosmography of my self’, sets the tone for the book that follows, pondering on the many changes and improvements in the field of medicine, infant mortality (Browne lost five of his children in infancy), and the availability of free medical treatment to people thanks to the founding of the NHS, which have occurred in the three-and-a-half centuries since Browne lived.

From this, we move to ‘Ambiguity’, a compelling opening chapter in which Francis considers ‘how Browne dealt with his innate capacity to be at ease with ambiguity, and reside in mystery.’ If this sounds like Keatsian Negative Capability two centuries before Keats came up with that concept, that only further shows how Browne’s understanding of the world transcended his own age.

Francis draws a helpful distinction between Browne’s near-contemporary Francis Bacon, who helped to lay the foundations of the scientific method but whose own prose is now read more by historians of science, and Browne, whose prose is still enjoyed by ‘enthusiasts of literature’. It’s a helpful ‘way in’ to Browne’s work, although I’d quibble with this description of Bacon, whose essays – also published in a well-edited volume by Oxford University Press – remain as readable as those of Montaigne, from whom Bacon learned that new form.

The chapter on Curiosity is also insightful and makes a good case for Browne’s continued relevance and readability. Virginia Woolf wrote of a ‘halo of wonder’ encircling Browne and everything he saw, and ‘a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery’. Francis wonders if this remarkable description of Browne’s own passion for wonder fed his own visual experience browsing the ‘shelves and vitrines of Edinburgh university’s anatomical museum’; it’s certainly a visual image that lodges itself firmly within the mind.

Francis’ own description of the various experiments conducted by Browne is similarly memorable. We learn that Browne tested substances for their behaviour under magnetism, fed various plants (and, at the more extreme end, glass) to dogs to prove they didn’t poison them, dissected horses, pigeons, snails, and toads, fed cheese to vipers, kept an ostrich, and fed iron to poultry, among various other empirical investigations. He even wondered if elephants ‘fart from their trunks’, and put a mole in a jar with a toad and a viper, to test the hypothesis that moles can be ferocious and deadly above ground.

The whole of Sir Thomas Browne: The Opium of Time is filled with such interesting insights into this remarkable man, and Francis strikes a good balance between personal reflection (in keeping with Browne’s own approach to writing that ‘cosmography of my self’) and biographical detail. Like other books in the My Reading series by OUP, it’s a brisk, brief read which is designed to whet the appetite and offer a way in to a particular topic. One can imagine at least a few readers being inspired to seek out more of Browne’s work as a result of reading this enthusiastic encomium to a fascinating, and endlessly fascinated, writer.