Born in August, 1809, the son of a medical practitioner in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. He was educated at various schools in the county, and was then apprenticed to Dr Barnett, of Stourport. He became a student at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals in 1827, but soon afterwards went to Paris, where he studied under Dupuytren, Chopart, and Laennec. He is said to have graduated in Paris and at Padua. During his residence in the French capital the revolution of 1830 broke out, and the lives of English dwellers in Paris were in especial danger; a fellow-student was in fact shot whilst sitting at his window. Brookes succeeded to his father’s practice in Much Wenlock, the latter having died in 1830. He passed his life in his native town, and did not retire till 1891, when he was presented by his friends and admirers with an illuminated address and pieces of plate. Brookes was in many respects a remarkable man of wide influence. He was an active philanthropist, devoting his talents to the public service. When he first came into his practice Much Wenlock was a small insanitary place of less than 500 houses, but owing to Brookes’s endeavours an open sewer in the main street was covered over, gas lighting was introduced, a library and reading-room were added; here Brookes obtained for exhibition the ancient deeds of Much Wenlock Abbey, and a large collection of coins and local antiquities. He was an accomplished Latinist and Hebraist, and a diligent reader, and so convinced of the value of athletics in education that he took a leading part in the movement which resulted in the institution of the National Olympian Association in 1850. This was the germ of the International Olympian Society of Paris, which has held contests in Athens, Paris, and London within recent years. In the middle years of the nineteenth century Brookes was an ardent advocate of reform in the Royal College of Surgeons, and wrote much on the subject in the *Lancet*. He died at Much Wenlock on December 10th, 1895.