On 27 June 1943, Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, first baronet (1783–1862) read a paper to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in which he described a case involving Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), the brilliant engineer of the Great Western Railway, bridges and steamships. Brodie had read several landmark papers to the Society but this was to be his most famous.
Brodie was born on 8 June 1783 at Winterslow, Wiltshire. His father was Peter Bellinger Brodie (1742–1804), rector of the parish, and his mother Sarah (1755–1847), daughter of Benjamin Collins, a banker and printer in Salisbury. Brodie was educated by his father and then went to London to study medicine. He read anatomy under John Abernethy at St Bartholomew's Hospital and James Wilson at the Hunterian school in Great Windmill Street. At around this time, he became a close friend of the surgeon William Lawrence.
In 1803, he started his surgical studies at St George's Hospital, becoming a House Surgeon in May 1805 and then Demonstrator in the anatomical school. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons on 18 October 1805. He was elected Assistant Surgeon to St George's Hospital in 1808, and was made Senior Surgeon in 1822, a post that he held until 1840.
Brodie's interests spanned physiology, surgery, and psychology. He demonstrated the control of gastric secretion by the vagus nerve at the Royal Society (to which he was elected on 15 February 1810) and gave the Croonian lectures there in 1810 and 1813. The Royal Society awarded him the Copley medal in 1811, its youngest ever recipient.
Overwork led to a breakdown in 1815 and he stopped experimenting. His marriage to Anne Sellon yielded four children, of whom one, Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie (1817–1880), became a distinguished chemist known for his investigations on the allotropic states of carbon and for his discovery of graphitic acid.
Brodie then devoted himself to surgery, becoming particularly interested in joints. In 1813–1815 he published three papers in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions that became the basis of a major treatise on orthopaedics, Pathological and Surgical Observations on the Diseases of the Joints (1818). This important book, in which he used case histories to teach surgeons limb-preserving surgery as opposed to amputation, went through five editions and was translated into several languages. The text included the first clinical descriptions of ankylosing spondylitis and of hysterical pseudofracture of the spine. In the fifth edition (1850) he identified Brodie's disease, a chronic synovitis of a joint, often the knee. He described the first subcutaneous operations for varicose veins in a paper in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1816. He described a technique for trephining the tibia for chronic inflammatory changes in 1828, pioneered a technique for correction of anal sphincter abnormalities in 1835, and identified a form of breast tumour following puberty (Brodie's tumour) in 1840. In Lectures Illustrative of Various Subjects in Pathology and Surgery (1846) he described claudication for the first time in humans.
In 1819, he moved to Savile Row for his private practice and was appointed Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons. While he held this office, he was summoned to attend George IV to assist on the removal of a tumour from the king's scalp. He became the king's personal surgeon in 1828 and attended him during his final illness in 1830. When William IV succeeded to the throne, Brodie was made Sergeant-Surgeon in 1832, a post he continued under Queen Victoria. He was made a baronet in 1834 and President of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1839, where he first introduced discussions during meetings. In 1844, he was elected President of the Royal College of Surgeons and the first President of the General Medical Council in 1858. In the same year, he became the first surgeon to be elected President of the Royal Society. His last public appearance following his wife's death in 1861 was at the Royal Medical Chirurgical Society on 31 December 1861. He died at his stately home in Broome Park, Betchwork, Surrey on 21 October 1862 from a shoulder swelling following a riding accident in 1834.
In this famous case that Brodie related, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been entertaining children after dinner when he inhaled a half-sovereign, which lodged in his right bronchus. When the coin refused to move, he consulted Brodie, who made several unsuccessful attempts to remove it. Brunel designed and constructed a movable platform with hinges to which he was strapped. His head was lowered to angle of 80 degrees to the horizontal and his back was repeatedly struck. Brodie next tried an artificial opening into the trachea but was unsuccessful in trying to extract the coin with forceps. Six weeks later, Brunel was again strapped to the platform and Brodie kept open the tracheal incision while Brunel was struck on the back. At last, ‘two or three efforts to cough followed, and presently he felt the coin quit the bronchus, striking almost immediately afterwards against the incisor teeth of the upper jaw, and then dropping out of the mouth; a small quantity of blood, drawn into the trachea from the granulations of the external wound, being ejected at the same time’. Although the story became legendary and was reported in many publications, this personal account in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions is the most accurate.
Eponyms associated with Benjamin Brodie
Brodie's abscess: a chronic bone abscess surrounded by dense fibrous tissue and sclerosis
Brodie's bursa: the medial subtendinous bursa of the gastrocnemius muscle or the bursa of the semimembranosus muscle
Brodie's disease: chronic hypertrophic synovitis of a joint, often the knee (Brodie's knee)
Brodie's serocystic disease (Brodie's tumour): a form of benign postpubertal breast tumour
Brodie-Trendelenburg test: for assessing valvular damage in veins
Brodie's pile: a mass of inflamed anal mucosa at the lower end of a fissure in ano
Selected bibliography by Benjamin Brodie
Pathological and Surgical Observations on Diseases of the Joints (1818)
Lectures on the Diseases of the Urinary Organs (1832)
Lectures Illustrative of Certain Local Nervous Affections (1837)
Hunterian Oration (1837)
An Introductory Discourse on the Duties and Conduct of Medical Students and Practitioners (1843)
Lectures Illustrative of Various Subjects in Pathology and Surgery (1846)
Psychological inquiries: in a series of essays (1854)
Physiological researches. Republished from the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (1851)
Smoking or no smoking? That's the question. With observations by ‘Scrutator’ and extracts from an occasional paper by Dr Copland (1860)
DECLARATIONS
Competing interests
None declared
Funding
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Ethical approval
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Guarantor
MR
Contributorship
Both authors contributed equally
Acknowledgements
This paper was originally published as Chapter 11 of Doctoring History by Manoj Ramachandran and Jeffrey K Aronson, published by the Royal Society of Medicine Press in 2010
