His book is anything but scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a fool.

Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle treatise in diagnosis.
A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne.

Of all the men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said.
He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day.

His eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep thinking.

He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an imaginative nature.