Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

Who was Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet?

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet was an English physiologist and surgeon who pioneered research into bone and joint disease.

Brodie was born in Winterslow, Wiltshire. He received his early education from his father, the Rev Peter Bellinger Brodie; then choosing medicine as his profession he went to London in 1801 and attended the lectures of John Abernethy and attended Charterhouse School. Two years later he became a pupil of Sir Everard Home at St George's Hospital, and in 1808 was appointed assistant surgeon at that institution, on the staff of which he served for over thirty years. In 1810 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, to which in the next four or five years he contributed several papers describing original investigations in physiology. In 1834, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

At this period he also rapidly obtained a large and lucrative practice and from time to time wrote on surgical questions, contributing numerous papers to the Medical and Chirurgical Society and to the medical journals. His most important work is widely acknowledged to be the 1818 treatise Pathological and Surgical Observations on the Diseases of the Joints, in which he attempts to trace the beginnings of disease in the different tissues that form a joint and to give an exact value to the symptom of pain as evidence of organic disease. This volume led to the adoption by surgeons of more conservative measures in the treatment of diseases of the joints, with consequent reduction in the number of amputations and the saving of many limbs and lives. He also wrote on diseases of the urinary organs and on local nervous affections of a surgical character.