Brodie was born in Northampton on 8 February 1866 to Reverend Alexander Brodie of
Grandborough. He was educated at
King's College School,
St John's College, Cambridge and graduated in medicine from
King's College London. He was appointed as the director of the combined laboratories of the
Royal College of Physicians and the
Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1899, where he served until their closure in 1902. In January 1903, he was appointed Professor-Superintendent of the
Brown Animal Sanatory Institution, a pathology research centre in London, where he stayed until he became Professor of Physiology at the
University of Toronto in 1908. He was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1904 and delivered the
Croonian Lecture in 1911. In 1911 he was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Brodie was also a
Fellow of the Chemical Society and a
Fellow of King's College London. Following the start of the first world war, Brodie joined the medical services of the Canadian Army as a
captain and accompanied the No. 4 University of Toronto Base Hospital to the United Kingdom in 1916. While in England, he was detached from No. 4 Hospital in order to focus on medical research involving the effects of wounds and disease on respiratory processes. During this research he was appointed Superintendent of a
Military Hospital in
Ramsgate. ==Personal life and death==