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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    fession, and a mark of recognition of the two acknow- ledged leaders of the surgical world of London ; and its extinction will be witnessed with regret, though we cannot but allow that the office has ceased to be necessary now that the sovereign’s personal presence with the army has become almost an impossibility, the especial duty of the Serjeant-Surgeon having been to attend the King whenever he joined his troops.? When Brodie declined to take over the anatomical museum of Mr. Wilson and purchase the goodwill of his school in Windmill Street, he built a theatre of his own in another house in that street for surgical lectures, and founded a museum of preparations illus- trative of surgical pathology, which now forms the nucleus of the museum of St. George’s Hospital. The fees of the students who entered to these surgical courses formed a part of his professional income, and are entered in Sir Benjamin’s fee-books with the scrupulous accuracy and business-like regularity which marked all his proceedings. But they formed so small a part of the large total of his professional income, and the labour was so serious an addition to his already too numerous engagements, that it is evident that he continued to lecture more for the love of the employment than for the profit it brought him. In those days, as we have said above, lectures were given in the evening, and Brodie says: “I had often scarcely time to eat a hasty dinner before I proceeded to the lecture-room, and then, almost immediately after my lecture was concluded, had to * See Appendix H for correspondence about Brodie’s appointment. 1@ ce)
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