Thomas browne was a 17th-century Norwich doctor who wrote mysterious-sounding books such as "Religio Medici" and "Pseudodoxia Epidemica". Few read him now, but some will know of him from "The Rings of Saturn", a novel by W.G. Sebald, a German author who died in 2001. Browne has long been a writer's writer, and Sebald is one of a line to be stirred by the "ceremonial lavishness", as he put it, of Browne's "labyrinthine sentences". Hugh Aldersey-Williams also admires Browne's labyrinths, but as a science writer himself he is particularly interested in Browne's understanding of science. Browne was a medical man, but he was also, in an age before specialisms, a naturalist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and an inventor of words-"medical" itself being among the 784 he coined.
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