Thomas Browne

Thomas Browne was a physician in Norwich for forty-five years who wrote, for himself, some of the most elaborate prose in English. Religio Medici, the religion of a doctor, was published without his permission in 1642 and became a European bestseller for its tolerant, curious and slightly heretical faith; Urn Burial, on some Saxon pots dug up in a field, rises to a meditation on oblivion that Johnson, Coleridge and Borges thought the finest thing in the language. He coined electricity, hallucination and dozens of other words, and testified at a witch trial that sent two women to their deaths.