Thomas Browne
Novelist
Seventeenth-century English author of Religio Medici and other works on religion, medicine, magic, and science. He published a 1646 encyclopedia entitled Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford and went on to study medicine in Leiden.
He died on his seventy-seventh birthday.
He was the son of a Cheshire silk merchant. He and his wife, Dorothy, had several children, including a son, Edward, who handled Browne's library after his 1682 death.
Browne's work was admired and popularized by author Charles Lamb.