Every term we feature a rare and interesting item from our collection.

Hilary Term 2025

The Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Brown, Kt., Doctor of Physick

On Saturday 8 February, there will be a celebration of Dame Janet Vaughan, Somerville alumna and its Principal 1945-1967, at which Sheena Evans, author of the 2024 biography, Bloomsbury, Belsen, Oxford: Janet Vaughan – Medical Pioneer, will speak. In view of this, it seemed appropriate to feature a scientific book from Somerville’s special collections this term. As Dame Janet spent the first part of her career working on blood diseases and setting up a blood transfusion service, most appropriate would have been William Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, first published in 1628, in which he is the first to describe correctly the circulation of the blood around the body, but unfortunately we don’t have a copy. We do, however, have the works of another seventeenth-century doctor, Sir Thomas Browne, who told his fellow physician Henry Power (probably then a medical student): ‘And be sure you make yourself master of Dr Harvey’s piece De Circul. Sang.; which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus.’ Browne did not make any major discoveries such as the circulation of the blood, but like Harvey he used the then revolutionary methods of observation and experimentation to test and verify ideas – methods that Janet Vaughan would also use – rather than accepting earlier tenets as authoritative and relying on reason alone.

Thomas Browne was born in London in 1605, and educated at Winchester College and Broadgates Hall, Oxford (which became Pembroke College the year after he entered it). After taking his MA, he continued his medical education on the Continent, at Montpellier and Padua, and finally Leiden, where he gained his doctorate in medicine in December 1633. Having returned to England, he served as a medical apprentice until 1637, when he moved to Norwich, and practised there until his death in 1682.

His first published work – although he did not intend to have it published – was Religio Medici (‘The Religion of a Physician’). This is a description of his religious beliefs, and of how he reconciles them with his study of medicine and natural philosophy – the philosophy of the natural world, for which we now use the term science. Then, as now, many thought that scientific study must be incompatible with religious belief. He originally, he says, wrote it down for his own private use – but then copies were made for and copied by friends, and one came into the hands of a London bookseller, Andrew Cooke, who in 1642 published it without naming an author. It was popular enough for him to issue a second edition in the same year, and the following year an edition corrected by Browne himself, with his name as author on the title page, was published. Many more editions, and translations into Latin and European languages, followed.

In 1646, another work by Browne was published: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths. This was a compendium of superstitions and falsely-held beliefs, which Browne refutes both by his own experimentation and by reference to other authors. For example, it was a common belief that bear-cubs were born as a formless lump which the mother literally licked into shape; Browne cites several reports of fully-formed cubs being found in the wombs of pregnant females to refute this. It was also believed that an ear of corn would not germinate if the ends were cut off; this, says Browne, he has disproved by making trial of it, and found that grains whose ends have been cut off may nevertheless sprout roots.

His next published work, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (1658), begins as a description of some recently-excavated burial urns and develops into a description of ancient burial practices, and shows the same mix of personal observation supplemented by extensive reading. It is coupled with The Garden of Cyrus, in which consideration of the Ancient Persians’ use in planting orchards of the quincunx – a pattern of five points arranged in an X – becomes an exploration of the significance of the quincunx and the number five in human art, the natural world, and mystical symbolism.

Browne published no more during his lifetime, although he continued to write, for himself, for his friends, and for possible future publication. In 1683, the year after his death, thirteen epistolary essays by him, edited by his kinsman Thomas Tenison, were published under the title Certain Miscellany Tracts, showing his wide-ranging interests and sometimes whimsical take on things.

On display here is a copy of Browne’s collected works, published in 1686, which includes all the works mentioned above. It came to Somerville library as part of the bequest of Amelia Blandford Edwards (1831-1892). Amelia Edwards, like Sir Thomas Browne, had wide-ranging interests, although she does not seem to have included much science among them, probably constrained by Victorian ideas of what was suitable for a woman. And she too travelled on the Continent; but in 1873, dissatisfied with the weather in France, she set off for Egypt instead. Egypt became her passion, and in particular the excavation and preservation of its ancient monuments – in 1882 she founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egypt Exploration Society). Her portrait hangs in the Amelia Edwards Room, at the eastern end of the Upper Library – a room which was added to the library specifically to house the Edwards collection of books.

---

Previously featured volumes