Patrick Browne (physician)

Patrick Browne (1720 to 1790) was an Irish physician and botanist who spent much of his working life in the West Indies. Born in Woodstock, County Mayo, he was sent as a boy to relatives on Antigua, returned to Europe in poor health after two years, and went on to study medicine, natural history and especially botany at Reims, Paris and Leiden, qualifying in 1743. He worked as a physician at St Thomas's Hospital in London, travelled to Barbados, Montserrat, Antigua and St Kitts, and settled as a physician in Jamaica in 1746. He corresponded with the botanist Carl Linnaeus, whose papers held fragments of Browne's articles on venereal diseases and yaws. His main work, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica of 1756, was illustrated by Georg Dionysius Ehret and gave new names to 104 plant genera. He retired to Rushbrook near Claremorris in County Mayo in 1771.