Brodie continued to demonstrate, and from 1809 to lecture at Great Windmill Street, until in 1812 (Sir) Charles Bell became principal lecturer there. In 1808 he was appointed assistant surgeon at St. George’s Hospital, by Home’s influence, and in reality did the work of a full surgeon almost from that date. Private practice he scarcely attempted, his hands being full of anatomical and hospital work. Robert Keate and Brodie were at the hospital daily, and superintended everything; there was never an urgent case that they did not visit in the evening. This surgical experience was at once turned to advantage by Wilson, who asked Brodie to join him in lecturing on surgery. From 1809 onward for nearly twenty years, Brodie gave this course of lectures, and had a good attendance of students; besides which he lectured on surgery at St. George’s Hospital till 1840. In 1809 he took a house in Sackville Street and received three private pupils, and in 1810 felt justified, from the increase of his means, in engaging in physiological enquiries, stimulated by Bichat’s researches. He was elected into the Royal Society in 1810; and in the same and following winter communicated to the Society two valuable papers, one “On the Influence of the Brain on the Action of the Heart and the Generation of Animal Heat;” and the other “On the Effects produced by certain Vegetable Poisons.” The former was given as the Croonian Lecture in 1810. These papers, though largely superseded by recent investigations, were quite remarkable for their time, and for the first he was awarded the Copley Medal in 1811, which had never before been given to so young a man. It is worth noting that a medal was awarded by the Royal Society to the second Sir Benjamin Brodie in 1850, for his investigations “on the chemical nature of wax.” With the exception of the two Herschels, this is the only instance in which father and son have received this honour. The most noted, perhaps, of Brodie’s physiological papers was one on the influence of the nervous system on the production of animal heat, published in 1812. He concluded that an animal with the nervous centres removed, or with their functions suspended by narcotic poison, lost its power of generating heat, even though the action of the lungs was kept up by artificial respiration. Brodie used the then little known woorara poison brought by Dr. Bancroft from Guiana, to produce suspension of the nervous action. In after life increase of practice left little time for further physiological research.