This edition of Religio Medici, the author's first book, followed the two unauthorised editions of 1642. Sir Thomas Browne "spent his working life as a doctor practising at Norwich, and not least remarkable is his aloofness from all the political disturbances through which he lived. A Platonist by temperament, the world to him was only an image, a shadow of the real, and all existence is merely the substance of reflections. Nothing is too minute to be considered: the smallest trifle may provide the key to the problem of existence and what lies beyond death. Browne's inimitable style mirrors the peculiarity of his thought: in an age given to erudition, metaphor and elaborate diction, his writing has an individual excess of all three of which the reader never tires" [PMM 131].