At length Brodie married (in 1816) Ann, the third daughter of Serjeant Sellon, his bride being only nineteen. This was in every way a happy marriage; and Sir Benjamin always warmly recognised his wife’s excellent moral training of their children. In the year of their marriage Brodie’s professional income from fees and lectures amounted to £1530. For some years he had paid special attention to diseases of the joints, which were then very ill understood; and in 1819 he published his classical work “On the Pathology and Surgery of Diseases of the Joints.” He clearly distinguished between diseases of the various tissues of which joints are composed; and also between hysterical, neuralgic, and merely local diseases. Many limbs, in which no disease could be found after removal, were at that time removed merely because pain was felt in them. A story told in the _Lancet_ on this subject is worth reproducing. “Late one evening a person came into our office, and asked to see the Editor of the _Lancet_. On being introduced to our sanctum, he placed a bundle upon the table, from which he proceeded to extract a very fair and symmetrical lower extremity, and which had evidently belonged to a woman. ‘There!’ said he, ‘is there anything the matter with that leg? Did you ever see a handsomer? What ought the man to be done with who cut it off?’ On having the meaning of those interrogatories put before us, we found that it was the leg of the wife of our evening visitor. He had been accustomed to admire the lady’s leg and foot, of the perfection of which she was, it appeared, fully conscious. A few days before, he had excited her anger, and they had quarrelled violently, upon which she left the house, declaring she would be revenged on him, and that he should never see the objects of his admiration again. The next thing he heard of her was that she was a patient in —— Hospital, and had had her leg amputated. She had declared to the surgeons that she suffered intolerable pain in the knee, and had begged to have the limb removed—a petition the surgeons complied with, and thus became the instrument of her absurd and self-torturing revenge upon her husband.”