Volume 1

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie / by Timothy Holmes.

  • Timothy Holmes
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie / by Timothy Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    estimate of his professional character which Brodie gave of him in the Hunterian Oration of 1837, and which he deliberately re-quotes in the Autobiography. “He was a great practical surgeon. His mind went direct to the leading points of the case before him, disregarding all those minor points by which minds of smaller capacity are perplexed and misled. Hence his views of disease were clear, and were such as were easily communicated to his pupils, and his practice was simple and decided. He never shrank from difficulties; but, on the contrary, seemed to have pleasure in meeting and overcoming them ; and I am satisfied that to this one of his qualities many of his patients were indebted for their lives.” He was successful in practice, though he never obtained the reputation or the income of Astley Cooper or Brodie, and if he had confined himself to surgery only, he would have left a name which perhaps now might not be much remembered outside of St. George’s Hospital, but would there be respected and reckoned on about the same level as that of Sir Caesar Hawkins, or any other of the numerous Serjeant Surgeons who grace the rolls of its surgical staff. Unluckily for his good name, he was intimately connected with the greatest medical philosopher of the age—John Hunter—who had married his sister, and whom he assisted in his researches in a subordinate capacity, until, as it seems, he began to think himself equal to the task of undertaking his master’s suc- cession, and filling the place left vacant by his sudden death. ‘To this he was wholly inadequate. I have
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