When BBC Verify has to step in with its own analysis of a photograph released of the Princess of Wales and her children, you are reminded once again that the truth of images is not to be relied upon.
Unreliable images
But it is an older problem than you might think, dating from well before computers and photography. In the 17th century, for example, the Norwich physician, writer and mythbuster Sir Thomas Browne concerned himself with just such questions.
The unreliable images that concerned him were not family snaps but the more fanciful compositions seen in heraldic symbols and church windows. With their abundance of mythical beasts and miraculous events, we know that these are not literal depictions. But at the time, many people were ready to believe that if an image existed then so too must the reality.
Browne the creator of language
Browne is remembered today for his glorious prose style. He is feted by literary figures as varied as Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf and WG Sebald, who features him in his meditative exploration of East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn (reviewed by Ben Smith in East Anglia Bylines, 17 March 2024)
He is one of the most prolific creators of the language. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the first use of hundreds of new words. Many stem from his profession, such as ‘ambidextrous’, ‘coma’, ‘follicle’, ‘pubescent’, and even ‘medical’ itself. Other words speak to the contentious times in which he lived and still resonate strongly for us today: ‘incontrovertible’, ‘precarious’, ‘indigenous’, ‘insecurity’, ‘migrant’.
Widespread false beliefs
Browne has never been more relevant than in our present, fractious times. His major work was Pseudodoxia Epidemica – he usefully glossed the title as “Vulgar Errors” – in which he catalogued and debunked dozens of widespread (epidemic) but false beliefs (pseudodoxies). These range entertainingly from whether badgers have their legs longer on one side so they can run along the furrows of ploughed fields to the arguable benefits of drinking gold. While many of the “vulgar errors” Browne covers concern folklore beliefs about animals, the properties of minerals and plants of dubious medicinal value, others have a sharp modern bite to them.
One of the seven volumes of Pseudodoxia Epidemica is devoted to “things questionable as they are commonly described in Pictures”. These include the Christian motif of the pelican piercing its breast with its beak (actual birds do not do this, he assures us) and the puzzle as to why Adam and Eve are typically depicted with navels even though they were not born of woman.
Browne the physician
Browne took a degree at Oxford in 1627 but found, as other Englishmen found at the time, that to become proficient in modern medicine, it would be necessary to extend his studies abroad. After training in Padua, Montpellier and Leiden, Browne settled in Norwich and practiced medicine there through the turbulent years of the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Restoration until his death in 1682. Despite the piercing clarity of his opinions on contentious topics, he never spoke up politically, and tended to royalists and republicans alike, for which he earned the admiration of all.
Seen as a man of science, people believed he might also be an atheist, which he went to lengths to deny in his first work, Religio Medici. In this confession of his moderate Christian faith as a doctor, he stated: “I borrow not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason”.
Browne’s “bedside manner” is displayed in a later essay called Letter to a Friend, which movingly describes the death of a young man suffering from tuberculosis whom he is powerless to help. Browne was an inspiration to the 19th-century Canadian physician Sir William Osler who introduced greater patient contact into medical training.
Browne in the 21st century
Both Browne’s ideas and his civil manner of presenting them could help us now. He calmly resolves the ever-present tension between science and religion. He finds ways to dispel the myths and pseudoscience of his time and does so in a uniquely forbearing manner. His own instincts are sceptical and empirical, yet he does not disdain more credulous souls. He rejects popular prejudices in circulation about minorities and, having seen more of humanity than most of his readers, advocates tolerance of human differences.
As he writes in his introduction to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, “we are not Magisterial in opinions, nor have we Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions; but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners”. It’s advice we would all do well to follow today.
