Those among us who think most clearly about death are usually such as philosophers or poets, not physicians. Nevertheless, there have been a few doctors who understood that death and its aftermath are not beyond the limits of the human condition and are, therefore, worthy of a healer’s attention. Such a one was Thomas Browne, who lived in that extraordinary seventeenth century when the scientific method and inductive reasoning first began to affect the thinking of educated people and made them question the truths so dear to their fathers. In 1643, Browne published a small literary jewel of
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