We admit that at such work the pen is mightier than the scalpel.

But in spite of all this we must not think of Sir Astley Cooper as a courtier. In his age he grew to have a great respect for the constituted authorities. To him a king was a king; and a lord was a lord indeed. England was the most beautiful and pleasant country under the heavens; and there were to be found the bravest and wisest men, the most lovely and virtuous women. He says so a dozen times, and we think none the less of him. The democracy of his ardent youth fell from him, as it has done from so many others; but his great work in life went on.

Always the honor and prosperity of his profession were most dear to him. Whenever he heard of a fine professional action he gloried in it, and he labored through life to elevate his calling in the eyes of men. His fellows recognized this in him, and this was the great reason for his constantly increasing popularity. To conquer shams, to foster science, to expose cant, to teach the truth, to seize the happy moment, to know real worth, to labor always for progress, - these were the great things in life to him.

And when at last, in old age, he died in harness, his ambition unquenched, and his courage firm and unfaltering to the last, the profession and the world felt that a monument in St. Paul's was but a humble tribute to the greatest surgeon of his time.

SIR BENJAMIN COLLINS BRODIE, BART.:
A SKETCH1

A YEAR ago, after publishing an essay on Sir Astley Cooper, I was asked to write something of Sir Benjamin Brodie. I have done so, and the subject has lent itself pleasantly to the task.

Of Brodie I found soon that this generation knows little; he is read seldom by students and other readers of our medical literature, yet the man was in some ways a great man; not so great, doubtless, as Cooper, fifteen years his senior, but a striking figure in his time; as a teacher, sound and resourceful; as a writer, facile and instructive; as a physician, accomplished and successful; a man of the world, broad, lovable, forceful, cultured.

We say that great men in any walk of life must reflect the spirit of their times—and this was true of Brodie as of Cooper. The latter was the contemporary of Nelson, Wellington, Fox, and Pitt; the former, of Peel and Palmerston, Sydney Smith and Macaulay. Though Brodie lived through the stormy days of the French Revolution, he does not belong, for us, to that age, but to the calmer era that succeeded, when Europe was being reconstructed, and the strenuous work of the soldier was giving place to the labors of the statesman and the philosopher.

'Read before the Warren Club, March 28, 1899.

Brodie was the finished product of his time. Society was being reorganized, politics were being purified, and the English people were being prepared for that great wave of altruism and social regeneration which we now know. Science, too, was taking its rightful place in the eyes of men who were beginning to appreciate the great truths taught by Hunter in the eighteenth century; and in all these revivals, with their changed conditions and new interests, Brodie took a prominent and forward part. Not a hero or a genius, but an accomplished man of exceptional talents and catholicity of view, he won and held long the foremost place among English surgeons.

Benjamin Collins Brodie was born in 1783, and died in 1862, and therefore belongs entirely to the nineteenth century, so far as his work in the world is concerned. Like many distinguished Englishmen, he was the son of a country clergyman. In his charming autobiography Sir Benjamin tells of his ancestry and boyhood; and the striking facts are these: that his father, a man of Scotch lineage, was a Whig in politics and a protégé of Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland, by whom he was presented with the living of Winterslow in Wiltshire. There he lived always, and there his children were born and educated. He was the father of many sons and daughters, whom he himself taught; and being a man of broad culture for the time in which he lived, he taught them well and thoroughly. Latin, Greek, English, French, Italian, were their studies; and upon such a foundation of the best literature. his distinguished son builded. This was a studious,

methodical, retiring boy, given to solitary rambles, and little addicted to the sports of the day, for which, indeed, his opportunities were small. "Thorough" was his motto; his opinions were his own.

He had eager physical vigor too, though he was small of stature and delicate of frame; and his patriotism flamed out in season. In 1798, when Napoleon threatened invasion, young Benjamin, with his two elder brothers, raised a company of one hundred and forty volunteers. He was commissioned ensign by the king. It was a fine, well-drilled, and creditable body of recruits.

Such a boyhood was in the great surgeon's background; but beyond this he was fortunate in family connections, professional and others, which counted to him for good. His grandfather was the grandfather also of that Thomas, Lord Denman, who was the advocate of the unhappy Queen Caroline, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench later. His paternal grandmother was a daughter of a well-known physician, Dr. Samuel Shaw. One daughter of this lady married Dr. Denman, the Chief Justice's father. Dr. Baillie and Sir Richard Croft had married his first cousins. With such a connection, it is not surprising that young Brodie came to follow some branch of the healing art. He had no "call" for it, but as he wanted a professional career, and his brother Peter had preceded him to London and was studying for the bar, he turned to surgery as his vocation, - not medicine, for he held no university degree. This was in the year 1801.

Brodie was sent to London to study surgery. The choice was made by his father, not by himself. His studies were entered upon faithfully, but without enthusiasm. A long time he felt disinclined for such work. He disliked his fellow-students; and this is a notable fact of his early professional days, that he disbelieved in "calls." In his autobiography he says some interesting things in that connection. He thought, always, that he should have done equally well in the Church, at the bar, or in the civil service. To him it was all a question of thoroughness, of endeavor.

In the early days of medical study those things which offend all sensitive men were especially repugnant to him; and, above all things, he disliked his associates. Indeed, the average medical student of a hundred years ago seems to have been a sorry fellow. Those youths mostly were drawn from the lower middle classes; they had little education or breeding, and were a rough, hard-drinking, boisterous, uncouth crowd, not at all pleasing as comrades to the fastidious young Brodie, the highly cultivated clergyman's son, fresh from the kindly home circle of Winterslow parsonage. But there were compensations for this in other associates social, rather than professional. Two young surgical friends he had indeed - Crawford and Lawrence of whom he thought highly, and they lived to justify his regard; and in the world at large men interested him, and the friends he made among them came to mean much to him. This association of his professional life with the interests of the community was typical of Brodie throughout his career; indeed,