Edward Browne (1644–1708)

[Dr. Edward Browne, eldest son of Sir Thomas Browne, was born in Norwich in 1644. He was educated at the Norwich Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.B. in 1633. He afterwards travelled on the Continent, staying for some time at Vienna, and making an expedition to Larissa in Thessaly, the scene of the medical practice of Hippocrates. He lived in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, on his return from his travels, became physician to Charles II. and to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (1682), as well as President of the College of Physicians (1704–8). He died in 1708.]

DR. EDWARD BROWNE translated (1672) a “ History of the Cossacks, and the lives of Themistocles and of Sertorius in Dryden’s Plutarch (1700), but his most interesting work is the account of his own travels, A Brief Account of Some Travels in Hungary, Styria, Bulgaria, Thessaly, Austria, Servia, Carynthia, Carniola, and Friuli. It was published in 1673, a further part in 1677, and both in one volume in 1685. He admired his father, and had learnt much both of literature and of science from him. He had read the Greek and Latin fathers as well as the classics, and admired his father’s writings; but his strain of thought is never as deep as that of Sir Thomas Browne, and he seldom rises above a simple narrative style, but tells many interesting things without enlarging upon them too much.

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