Carol Palfrey gave her short talk on Sir Thomas Browne.
Medical, migrant, precarious, ferocious, electricity, precarious, holocaust and hallucination.
What do these words have in common? The answer is that these are just nine of the 784 words coined by the subject of my talk today – Sir Thomas Browne – who lived in Norwich, the capital city of my home county, for 46 years. I have called him the Forgotten Hero because very few local people have ever heard of him. Now this is surprising because Norwich boasts very few statues. Yet right in the heart of the city is a splendid statue of Sir Thomas, who sits on his pedestal completely overlooked by passers-by except for the odd pigeon alighting on his head.
So who is Sir Thomas Browne and why have I called him a Hero? He was a man of many parts – a philosopher, a Christian moralist, a naturalist, an antiquarian, an experimenter, a myth-buster and, as I have already pointed out, a coiner of new words which he invented to meet his exacting needs for description. Browne was an intensely curious man whose concerns included disabusing the credulous of their erroneous beliefs, the meaning of order in nature, how to reconcile science and religion and how to think about life and death. These are some of the preoccupations of our own age and I believe the spirit of Thomas Browne could teach us all how to think in a more open-minded way about these matters.
Thomas Browne was the son of a wealthy silk merchant. He was born in London on 19th October 1605, was sent to school in Winchester and went on to study medicine at Oxford. However, the curriculum there was somewhat old fashioned and he therefore travelled to Padua and Leiden, the leading European centres of medicine at the time. Although these continental studies contributed to the development of his curious mind, they also exposed him to the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants raging at the time.
After qualifying as a doctor, he married and in 1636 settled in Norwich, setting up what became the city’s leading medical practice. He remained in Norwich until his death in 1682 and is buried in the city’s largest church, near the site of his house – and his statue. In 1642 the Civil War broke out. Norfolk fought on the side of the Parliamentarians. Browne witnessed the Puritans sacking the Cathedral and churches in Norwich but, despite his Royalist leanings, he led a relatively quiet and uneventful life.
As well as being a much loved and respected physician, Sir Thomas was renowned in his lifetime as a writer of philosophical essays. His first book, Religio Medici, was a kind of spiritual autobiography presenting his tolerant approach to religious differences in a country increasingly divided by doctrinal disagreements. ‘Belief can be soft and flexible’, says Browne. ‘I have experienced a few Christians and I have mixed my own by commolition to satisfy mine own reason.’ His best known statement about religion comes at the beginning of Religio Medici, in which he admits that many people might think he has no religious belief which, he says ‘is the scandal of my profession’. He goes on to explain that his attitude towards religion and science is impartial, neither violently defending the one nor opposing the other. ‘But still,’ he concludes, ‘I assume the honourable stile of a Christian.’ What is most striking about Browne’s independent attitude to religion, at a time of religious conflict is that he does not come down on the side of either the Catholics or the Protestants but daringly says: ‘I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva but the dictates of my own reason.’ Religio Medici was immediately put on the Papal index of banned books. Browne’s Christian faith leads him towards a humanistic moral philosophy.
He reconciles any conflict between science and religion by putting science in one place to be dealt with in one way and religion in another place to be dealt with in another way. But, as we have seen, Browne’s faith is his own and not one foisted upon him by any Authority. Browne recognised that religious texts are interesting, confusing and ambiguous because they contain more than literal truth. His religion, unlike his science, is not a rational way to understand the world but poetic, mythic and metaphorical. It makes him tolerant and predisposes him to seriousness before mystery. Browne is content to understand a mystery without definition.
Let us listen to what Sir Thomas might have said in an imaginary conversation about his faith: ‘I looked at many things and wished to look at more. I am a tireless slave to curiosity. Surely, though, we cannot doubt there is something beyond what we can see. It is the purest conceit to think that the world reaches no further than the limits of our own senses’.
In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, written in 1646, he records and corrects popular misconceptions about the natural world. For example, there was a popular belief that dead kingfishers made good weathervanes because, when hung up, they would point in the direction of the wind. So Browne carried out his own experiment. He hung up two dead kingfishers and found that they often pointed in different directions, proving once and for all that the belief was not true. A more esoteric question which he pondered was whether Adam and Eve, being created by God, had belly buttons.
Another of Browne’s major works was Urne Buriall, written in 1658, in which he meditates on death and cremation in the light of the discovery of a cluster of urns containing buried bones in a field near Walsingham. ‘Who knows the fate of his bones?’ he reflects.
The Garden Of Cyrus, written in 1658, explores what he calls the ‘mystical mathematics’ of numbers and, through careful observation, he notices the prevalence of the number five in nature. He considers the benefit of planting trees in groups of five set out in a lattice pattern which he calls a quincunx.
Browne was much admired by Samuel Johnson but Johnson obviously found some difficulty dealing with all of Browne’s newly-minted words, as only two made it into his dictionary. Who else joins Johnson in praising Browne? Over the centuries he has been admired by a number of eminent writers including Coleridge, who believed that his generation of writers owed a great debt to Thomas Browne, whom he called ‘A crack’d Archangel’. When writing Moby Dick Melville was inspired by Browne’s fidelity to nature, as well as his mystical side, and he makes use of Browne’s description of the Sperm Whale he had observed when one was washed up on a Norfolk beach. Virginia Woolf was enthralled by Browne’s antiquarian interests. W. G. Sebald includes a reference to Browne in Saturn’s Moons and the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, remarked that he set out on his career by doing his best to be Sir Thomas Browne. Browne’s most renowned literary champion today is the Spanish novelist, Javier Marias.
I would not be honest if I omitted the one stain on Sir Thomas Browne’s reputation. He attended a witch trial in Bury St Edmunds – it is not known why. The judge, who was uncertain about the evidence, saw Browne in the public gallery and called on him as an expert witness. Browne gave his opinion that the symptoms of allegedly bewitched children were natural but then added the comment that that this naturalness was evidence of the ‘subtility’ of the Devil controlling the witches’ actions. We do not know whether this remark was the deciding factor in the verdict of the court but the accused women were found guilty and hanged.
However, bearing in mind the obsession with witchcraft at that time, I for one, am prepared to forgive him for what we would now consider an irrational error.
Browne was never elected to the Royal Society, though this was something he undoubtedly deserved, possibly because he remained in Norwich rather than mixing in London’s scientific circles.
Browne received his knighthood almost by accident during a Royal visit to Norwich when the Lord Mayor, who was a strict republican, refused to accept the honour usually conferred on an eminent local dignitary and suggested that the title be granted to Thomas Browne.
Finally, I would like to share a couple of personal reasons for wishing to talk about Sir Thomas Browne.
He was the first person to document the Norfolk dialect. In his tract entitled: Of Languages and Particularly of the Saxon Tongue he identified words such as ‘mawther’ (meaning woman or girl), a word still in use in Norfolk today. And, best of all, he actually mentions the village where I live when he reports: ‘A kind of stork was shott in the wing by the sea neare Hasburrowe (Happisburgh, pronounced Hazeborough) and brought alive unto mee; it was about a yard high, red head, colourd leggs, and bill, the clawes resembling human nayles, such as Herodotus describeth in the white Ibis of Egypt.’ There is so much more to say about Sir Thomas Browne but I leave you with what I think is one of his most memorable phrases: ‘Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible Sun within us’ .
Carol Palfrey is the convenor of the Norwich SOF Group and Secretary to SOF Trustees.