Sir Thomas Browne: physician 1605-1682 and the Religio Medici

Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682, a physician of great scholarship, published his Religio Medici in 1642 as an expression of his own religious and professional beliefs. He had studied in Oxford and then turned to medicine and he pursued these studies in the Uni-versities of Montpellier, Padua and Leiden in Europe. Returning to Britain, he completed his medical degree and practised in Norwich for over three decades. He was considered one of the foremost physicians in England, although he did not practise in London, and he was conscious of the need for doctors to have a good knowledge of anatomy at a time when, before anaesthesia, surgery was becoming more adventurous. He was knighted by King Charles II in 1671. The curtailment of anatomy teaching in many undergraduate and postgraduate schools of medicine today would not have appealed to Browne. It is of growing concern to surgical colleges and academies who are now required to provide additional postgraduate anatomy teaching in order to satisfy the requirements of their examinations for surgeons.