Browne was born in Woodstock, County Mayo in 1720,Ray Desmond, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists (1994), p. 110. sent to relatives on Antigua in 1737 and returned to Europe due to ill health after two years. He studied medicine, natural history and especially botany at Reims, Paris, and Leyden, qualifying in 1743. He worked as a physician at St. Thomas's Hospital, London, visited Barbados, Montserrat, Antigua, and St. Kitts in the West Indies and settled as physician in Jamaica in 1746.
