Thomas Fuller

1654–1734 · English physician & adage collector

Thomas Fuller (1654–1734) was an English physician trained at Queens’ College, Cambridge, who is best remembered not for medicine but for two anthologies of proverbs and maxims: Introductio ad Prudentiam (1726–27) and the massive Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs (1732). He was a collector of sayings, gathering ancient, foreign and British adages into numbered lists — which is why phrases ‘from Fuller’ are often folk proverbs he preserved rather than lines he invented. He is frequently confused with the earlier churchman-historian Thomas Fuller (1608–1661).

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