Sir Thomas Browne Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE VULGAR ERRORS Between the year 1636, when he finished Religio Medici, and 1646, when he published in folio his massive Pseudodoxia Epidemica,... more » we cannot trace any literary work in which Browne was certainly engaged, other than jotting down and arranging the notes which were to form his "inquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors." A great sensation had been produced in the course of the previous generation by the publication of two books by the French physician Dr. Laurent Joubert, entitled Paradoxa Medico, and De Vulgi Erroribus. The vogue of these works had been extraordinary, and when Browne was at Montpellier, they still preserved their celebrity. I cannot help thinking that the names of these famous volumes, and something of their scope, unconsciously affected the Norwich physician in the choice of titles for his great treatise, although he is careful to say that he " reaped no advantage" from the study of Joubert, and that he found De Vulgi Erroribus " answering scarce at all to the promise of the inscription." Joubert exposed mistakes which empirical doctors were in the habit of making in the treatment of disease, but that was not Browne's purpose in any degree. Our medicus is very anxious that we should give him credit for the novelty of his design, and we have to admit that the Vulgar Errors (as Pseudodoxia Epidemica is usually and conveniently styled) was a work of considerable originality. It is plain that the form it now takes was the result of accident, not of forethought. The book was composed "by snatches of time"; Browne quaintly remarking that such a work as this is not to be " performed upon one leg." It could not be written rhetorically, as a tour de force, nor, a...« less