I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof. ’Tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us, that our nearest friends, wife, and children, stand afraid and start at us.

This remark comes from Sir Thomas Browne’s early prose work *Religio Medici* (written c. 1635; first printed 1642), a personal meditation in which the physician-author reflects on faith, mortality, and the body. Browne writes as a practicing doctor in an age when death was common and its physical signs were familiar at close range. In the surrounding discussion he distinguishes between fearing death as an event and recoiling from what death does to the human form—how quickly the body becomes altered and socially “unpresentable.” The passage reflects Browne’s characteristic blend of medical observation, Christian moral reflection, and baroque rhetoric.

Browne claims he does not chiefly dread death itself, but feels “ashamed” of it: death is a humiliating exposure of human frailty, able in an instant to mar the face and body so that even intimates recoil. The “disgrace and ignominy” are not moral guilt but the indignity of corporeal decay—an affront to human dignity and self-recognition. The line captures a tension central to *Religio Medici*: the soul’s aspirations versus the body’s vulnerability. It also anticipates later reflections on the social dimension of dying—how death disrupts relationships by making the beloved suddenly strange, even frightening.