Thomas Browne was a Norwich physician who wrote some of the strangest and most beautiful prose in English, and who gave the language several hundred words, among them electricity, hallucination, medical, computer and literary. Religio Medici (1643) is a doctor's private statement of his own beliefs, circulated in manuscript and then pirated into print. It is tolerant, curious and cheerfully odd — Browne enjoys the parts of faith that cannot be reasoned about, collects difficulties rather than resolving them, and writes with a Latinate roll that Coleridge, Lamb, Melville, Borges and Sebald all fell for. The Catholic Church put it on the Index. Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) set out to examine common errors — that elephants have no knees, that badgers' legs are longer on one side — by reason, authority and experiment, making it an early monument of empirical scepticism. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658), prompted by Roman urns dug up in Norfolk, becomes a meditation on oblivion whose final chapter is among the most celebrated passages of English prose. He was knighted in 1671 and died on his seventy-seventh birthday.