Thomas Browne was a country doctor in Norwich for more than forty years, and in his spare hours he wrote prose so rich and strange that writers from Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf to W. G. Sebald have fallen under its spell. He was born in London, the son of a silk merchant, and studied medicine at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, the best medical schools of the day, before settling in Norwich in 1637.

His first book, Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Doctor”), was written for himself and passed around among friends in manuscript. Someone printed it without his permission in 1642, and he hurried out a corrected edition the next year. It is a private, searching meditation on how a man of science can also be a man of faith, written at a time when people were about to go to war over religion. It was translated across Europe.

Browne was endlessly curious. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), better known as Vulgar Errors, he went through popular beliefs one by one: that elephants have no joints, that badgers have shorter legs on one side, that a dead kingfisher hung by a thread will point its beak into the wind. Some he tested himself. He is credited with the first recorded uses of many English words, among them “electricity” and “hallucination.”

His masterpiece grew out of a field. In 1658, after some ancient burial urns were dug up in Norfolk, he wrote Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, a short book about how the dead are buried and remembered, and how little of us survives. Its last chapter is one of the great passages of English prose, a long, solemn music on the vanity of hoping to be remembered.

There is a twist worth knowing. In 1840, workmen in the Norwich church where he lay accidentally broke open his coffin, and his skull was taken away. It sat in a hospital museum for eighty years before it was finally reburied in 1922. Browne, who had written so beautifully about what happens to our bones, would have had something to say about that.

He was knighted by Charles II in 1671, and he died on his 77th birthday.