AdminHistory | Patrick Browne (c.1720-1790) was born in Woodstock, County Mayo, and educated locally before being sent to live with relatives on Antigua in 1737. He stayed for a year before returning to Europe due to health reasons, where he then studied medicine. He graduated from the University of Rheims in 1742 before matriculating but not graduating from the University of Leiden. Browne spent three years as a doctor in St Thomas’s Hospital in London before returning in 1746 to the West Indies, where he practiced as a physician in Kingston, Jamaica. He spent any spare time that he had studying the natural history of the island. He corresponded with the botanist Carl Linnaeus, among whose papers were found fragments of articles on venereal diseases and yaws by Browne. Browne retired to Rushbrook, near Claremorris, Co. Mayo in [1770] and died in 1790.
His major work, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (1756), illustrated by the botanic artist Georg Dionysius Ehret, contains new names for 104 genera and was noteworthy because it used Linnaeus' sexual system.
Browne began compiling an Irish Flora soon after he returned to Ireland in 1770. It is thought that he used the following works in his research: 'Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum' (1726) by Caleb Threlkeld, 'Botanalogia universalis Hibernica, or a universal Irish herbal' (1744) by John Keogh, and 'An essay towards a natural history of the county of Dublin' (1772) by John Rutty. He correspondend with Sir Joseph Banks about [it is thought] the manuscript, and Banks believed that it would be good for furthering the study of science in Ireland.
See Flowers of Mayo, Dr. Patrick Browne's Fasciculus plantarum Hiberniae 1788 ed. E. Charles Nelson and W. Walsh (1995) for further information on the life and work of Browne. |
Description | Handwritten manuscript by Pk [Patrick] Browne entitled 'A catalogue of the plants of Jamaica and other English sugar-colonies, ranged & digested according to the Linnaean System. To which is adid [added] a brief account of ye [the] sulphur or sulphurarium of Mountserat [Montserrat - mountainous Caribbean island] & a specifick method of cure for ye [the] Yaws.
A preface signed P.B. [Patrick Browne] outlines the reasons for the work by Browne: 'To illucidate those elegant drafts of Sir Hans Sloane voyage to Jamaica & adapt them them [sic] to ye [the] Linnean System; to correct some erors [errors] in Browne's Natural History of Jamaica, and to give ye [the] publick a few new species and genera not mentioned by Linneus [Linnaeus] have been my motives for this piece, there being few people who have had such an opportunity of examining those production on the spot with so much leasure [leisure] or attention.'
The publications which Browne refers to in his preface are thought to be Sir Hans Sloane's 'A voyage to the islands Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history ...' (1707) and Patrick Browne's 'The civil and natural history of Jamaica ...' (1756)
Above the title is written: 'J.E.Smith. The gift of his friend A.B. Lambert.'
Also contains 7 leaves from another small notebook disbound and mounted flat, originally 28 pp., with systematic botanical notes. |