f Christendom. Returning
homeward through Holland, he received the degree of doctor of medicine
from the University of Leyden in 1633, and settled in practice at
Halifax, England.

At this time--favored probably by the leisure which largely attends the
beginning of a medical career, but which is rarely so laudably or
productively employed,--he wrote the treatise 'Religio Medici,' which
more than any other of his works has established his fame and won the
affectionate admiration of thoughtful readers. This production was not
printed until seven years later, although some unauthorized manuscript
copies, more or less faulty, were in circulation. When in 1642 "it
arrived in a most depraved copy at the press," Browne felt it necessary
to vindicate himself by publishing a correct edition, although, he
protests, its original "intention was not publick: and being a private
exercise directed to myself, what is delivered therein was rather a
memorial unto me than an example or rule unto any other."

In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established himself there
in the practice of physic. There in 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, a
lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not only improving his social
connections, but securing a wife "of such symmetrical proportion to her
worthy husband both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed
to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." Such at least was the
view of an intimate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John
Whitefoot, in the 'Minutes' which, at the request of the widow, he drew
up after Sir Thomas's death, and which contain the most that is known of
his personal appearance and manners. Evidently the marriage was a happy
one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left _maestissima
conjux_, as her husband's stately epitaph, rich with many an _issimus_,
declares. Twelve children were born of it; and though only four of them
survived their parents, such mortality in carefully tended and
well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it would be now,
when two centuries more of progress in medical science have added
security and length to human life.

The good mother--had she not endeared herself to the modern reader by
the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of domestic life
that her family letters reveal--would be irresistible by the ingeniously
bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing even the wide limits
then allowed to