Brothers of Purity
An association of Arab philosophers founded at Bosra in the tenth century. They had forms of initiation, and they wrote many works which were afterwards much studied by the Jews of Spain.
Brown, John Mason: on prophecy by American medicine man. (See Divination.) Browne, Sir Thomas: A learned English medical man who died in 1682 at an advanced age. Besides his famous Religio Medici and Urn Burial, he was chiefly celebrated by the manner in which he combatted popular errors in a work entitled Pseudodoxia Epadinium, an essay on popular errors, an examination of many circumstances in his time received as veritable facts, and which he proved to be false or doubtful. But frequently the learned author replaces one error by another, if on the whole his book is wonderfully accurate considering the date of its composition. The work is divided into seven books, the first of which deals with those errors which spring from man's love of the marvellous; the second, errors arising from popular beliefs concerning plants and metals, the third, absurd beliefs connected with animals; the fourth book treats of errors relative to man; the fifth, errors recorded by pictures; the sixth deals with cosmographical and historical errors, and the seventh, with certain commonly accepted absurdities concerning the wonders of the world. For the publication of this work he was charged with atheism, which drew from him his famous Religio Medici. Bruhesen, Peter Van : A Dutch doctor and astrologer who died at Bruges, in 1571. He published in that town in 1550 a Grand and Perpetual Almanack in which he scrupulously indicated by the tenets of judicial astrology the correct days for bathing, shaving, hair-cutting and so forth. The work caused offence to a certain magistrate of Bruges who plied the tonsorial trade, with the result that there appeared against Bruhesen's volume another Grand and Perpetual Almanack, with the flippant subtitle a scourge for empirics and charlatans. This squib was published by a rival medico, François Rapaert, but Peter Haschaerts, a surgeon, and a protagonist of astrological science, warmly defended Bruhesen in his Astrological Buckler.