A physician with historical interests
Brown lived from 1857 to 1929, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s biographical index. His working life was closely associated with Milwaukee. A contemporary court record describes him as practising medicine in the city from 1879, while a portrait made by Simon Leonard Stein in November 1914 is catalogued by the Society as a likeness of the Milwaukee physician and surgeon.
His publications show a sustained interest in the history of medicine. The Beginnings of Intravenous Medication appeared in Annals of Medical History in 1917, and the journal’s later editorial lists name him as an associate editor. These records place him within the medical profession’s historical scholarship, alongside the literary work represented by the held volume.
These professional records leave much of Brown’s childhood and private life unclear. His translator’s preface gives a more personal account of one undertaking: his decision to turn Louÿs’s prose poems into English.
Translating Louÿs’s invented antiquity
The held title page credits Pierre Louÿs with the French text and Brown with putting it into English. Although it retains the phrase describing a translation from Greek, Brown’s preface explicitly identifies that premise as a literary pretence. Bilitis is Louÿs’s invented ancient poet, and the account of her life and the discovery of her tomb belongs to the fiction surrounding the poems.
Brown says that he began the translation for his own amusement, prompted by his admiration for Louÿs’s language and treatment of physical beauty. He presents publication as a later decision, encouraged by readers who had seen the work. His preface is signed at Milwaukee in September 1903; the Aldus Society title page is dated 1904 and gives London and New York as the places of publication.
