Biographical Sketch of Sir Benjamin Brodie, late Sergeant-Surgeon to the Queen, and President of the Royal Society

Extract

We extract from this graceful sketch by Professor Acland of the life of our late distinguished honorary member, an estimate of the character of Sir Benjamin Brodie, and of his attainments as a Psychologist. “The character of Brodie” (writes Professor Acland) “can only be properly considered as a whole. Neither as scientific man, nor as surgeon, nor as author, was he so remarkable as he appears when viewed as he was—a complete man necessarily engaged in various callings. It was impossible to see him acting in any capacity without instinctively feeling that there he would do his duty, and do it well. Nor could he be imagined in a false position. A gentleman, according to his own definition of that word, ‘he did to others that which he would desire to be done to him, respecting them as he respected himself.’ Simple in his manners, he gained confidence at once; accustomed to mix with the poorest in the hospital and with the noblest in their private abodes, he sympathised with the better qualities of each—valued all, and despised nothing but moral meanness. Though as a boy he was retiring and modest, he was happy in the company of older persons, and, as he grew older, loved in his turn to help the young. ‘I hear you are ill,’ he wrote once in the zenith of his life to a hospital student of whom he did not then know much; ‘no one will take better care of you than I; come to my country house till you are well;’ and the student stayed there two months. He was thought by some reserved—he was modest; by others hasty—he valued time, and could not give to trifles that which belonged to real suffering; he was sometimes thought impatient, when his quick glance had already told him more than the patient could either describe or understand. Unconscious of self, of strong common sense, confident of his ground or not entering thereon, seeing in every direction, modest, just, sympathetic, he lived for one great end—the lessening of disease. For this object no labour was too great, no patience too long, no science too difficult. He felt indeed (to use his own words on the day of his election as President) ‘his happiness to be in a life of exertion.’ As a professional man he valued science because it so often points the way to that which is practically useful to man; but as a scientific man his one object was the truth, which he pursued for its own sake, wholly irrespective of any other reward which might or might not follow on discovery. He had not the common faults of common men, for he had not their objects, nor their instinct for ease, nor their prejudices: though he became rich, he had not unduly sought riches; though he was greatly distinguished, he had not desired fame: he was beloved, not having courted popularity. What he was himself, that he allowed other men to be, till he found them otherwise. He saw weak points in his profession, but he saw them as the débris from the mountains of knowledge and of wisdom, of benevolence and of self-denial, of old traditional skill ever growing and always purifying, those eternal structures on which are founded true Surgery and Medicine. If ever he was bitter in society, it was when they were undervalued; if ever sarcastic, it was when the ignorant dared assume to judge them. A light is thus thrown on his even career of uniform progress. Training his powers from youth upwards, by linguistic and literary studies, by scientific pursuits, by the diligent practice of his art, by mixing with men, he brought to bear on the multifarious questions which come before a great master of healing, a mind alike accustomed to acquire and to communicate, a temper made gentle by considerate kindness, a tact that became all but unerring from his perfect integrity. He saw that every material science conduces to the well-being of man; he would countenance all, and yet be distracted by none. He knew the value of worldly influence, of rank, of station, when rightly used; he sought none, deferred excessively to none; but he respected all who, having them, used them wisely, and accepted what came to himself unasked, gave his own freely to all who needed, and sought help from no one but for public ends. A few words only may be added on the inner life of his later days. Those who knew him only as a man of business would little suspect the playful humour which sparkled by his fireside—the fund of anecdote, the harmless wit—the simple pleasures of his country walk. Some, who knew these, might not have imagined another and deeper current which flowed unheard when neither the care of his patients nor his literary pursuits or memories engaged his mind. He who from his early professional life sat down every night, his work ended, his notes entered, his next day ordered, to ask what could have been better done to-day and what case otherwise managed, was not one to reach threescore years and ten without a keen onward gaze on the entire destiny of man. Yet he who realised in his profession the answer of Trophilus the Ephesian to the question, Who is a perfect physician?—‘he who distinguishes between what can and what cannot be done'—such a man would not dogmatise on what cannot be known, nor would he, so humble, attempt to scan the Infinite. But his nature yearned for some better thing to come; and yearning, it became satisfied. He had for many years thought and conversed among his friends on facts he had noted in relation to our mental organisation. In the year 1854, he published anonymously a volume on Psychological Enquiries. This was followed by a second, with his name, in 1862. These volumes contain little that is actually new to professed psychologists; but they are the conclusions of one who had thought and worked—variously, consistently, practically. Living not in the closet, but hearing the opinions of every party and of every kind of men—liberal in all his views—without prejudice, and ever open to conviction, yet tinged with a general dislike to change as such—he tells in these volumes what he had concluded concerning the mind of man—its laws, its discipline, its future state. They therefore who value such a character will prize these writings for qualities other than the novelties they may contain. It will be remembered that the scientific inquiries of his early life related to the influence of the nervous system on certain parts of the animal economy. To the ordinary physiologist this may be a purely material question; to him it was not so. In middle life he said to a friend, speaking of his lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of the Brain, ‘the complexity of the mechanism of the higher brains is enough to make one giddy to think of it.’ A fortnight before his death he once more talked to the same person of this mysterious link between our consciousness and our visible material organisation, descanting with keen interest on the relations between mind and body, and the mutual reactions of one on the other. As he then lay on his sofa almost for the last time, in great pain, having scarce for many months seen the outer world, which had been so much to him, and to which he had been so much, he spoke freely of our ignorance as to many things which it would be a joy to know—of the existence of evil—of the too little attention which philosophers had paid to the terrible nature of physical pain—of the future state. So gathering up the teachings of his useful life, and still, as ever, looking forward, he waited its close. Not many days after this he breathed his last, at Broome Park, on October 21, 1862, in possession of the full calm power of his disciplined mind to within a few hours of his death.”