Research reviewFrom Claude Bernard to Walter Cannon. Emergence of the concept of homeostasis
Section snippets
An introduction to this historical review
Drinking and eating obviously have major roles in the body's uses and contents of water and metabolic energy. Compared with the daily rates of intake and expenditure of drinks and foods, the amounts of fluid and energy sources stored in the body are remarkably stable, notwithstanding the problem of obesity, and despite continuing controversy on how (or even whether) the control of intake is related to the regulation of physiological states in human beings.
The stabilisation of bodily states is
Chemical breakdown achieved by digestive juices
Claude Bernard's first major discovery came from research into the physiology of digestion that he had pursued after his M.D. thesis in 1843. Armed with anatomical knowledge and surgical skills, a working collaboration with experimental chemists, and an enquiring, resourceful mind, Bernard confidently established his presence as a leading physiologist. As recorded in laboratory notebooks that survive, after inconclusive work for nearly 5 years, the critical experiments were accomplished and
Bernard's ‘Introduction’
On 21 August, 1865, aged 52, Bernard presented to the Académie des Sciences seven volumes of his published lectures and his newly published An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Bernard, 1865). He had intended this volume to become the introduction to a larger work but that project was never realised. The American physiologist Lawrence J. Henderson was a champion of Claude Bernard and wrote a foreword to the first translation of the Introduction into English (Bernard, 1927).
The
Le milieu intérieur
Bernard's classic account of the internal environment (le milieu intérieur) is in his posthumously published work, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux (Bernard, 1878). In the second lesson, he categorises life in three forms: la vie latente, a state of “indifference” or lack of chemical transactions; la vie oscillante, a state in which living processes fall under the influence of the external environment (Bernard puts all the plant kingdom into this category,
Haldane and Henderson: philosophical physiologists
Two eminent physiologists led a transplantation to British and American soil of Bernard's insights concerning internal regulation, autonomy and stability: the Scotsman John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), who trained and worked at Oxford, and the American Lawrence Joseph Henderson (1878–1942), who trained and worked at Harvard. Allen (1967) endorsed a view that “Bernard's work served less as a paradigm for guiding physiological research than as a convenient principle for bringing together results of
From digestive movements to fear and rage
Walter B. Cannon belonged to a generation of American physiologists who did not travel to Europe to train in leading laboratories as many of their predecessors had done. Nevertheless, he was well aware that he was heir to a European tradition in biology and physiology. When Cannon was in Paris in 1918, eager to continue his experimental investigations, he found space in the Collège de France, “only a few hundred yards from the little rooms where Claude Bernard carried on his researches for more
Negative feedback: a mechanism for homeostasis
Cannon, I have suggested, shifted the argument in regulatory physiology away from the steady state of the internal environment, as emphasised by Bernard, towards the processes of control that help to stabilise conditions in the body. This idea of control has implications that Cannon did not make explicit but Starling had started to develop as early as 1908. In a lecture given that year to the Harvey Society in New York, published under the title The Chemical Control of the Body, Starling
Concluding perspective
Bernard had trained and developed as an analytical experimentalist, reducing complex phenomena to simpler problems that could be tackled in the laboratory (compare, for drinking and eating, Cannon, 1919, and Cannon & Washburn, 1912). As Medawar (1967) wrote, “research is surely the art of the soluble.” Bernard was fully aware that physiology faced a much bigger issue than the other sciences of his day: how to explain the complex, highly organized and goal-oriented systems on which life itself
Acknowledgements
After Professor Cooper retired, his PA while Head of Department, Mrs Anne Halliwell, kindly produced a photographically illustrated monograph he had written with the title, “From Claude Bernard to Walter Cannon: the emergence of the concept of homeostasis in 19th and 20th century experimental physiology and medicine.”
This abbreviated version for publication has been prepared (and introduced) by David Booth and reviewed by Gerry Smith. While terminally ill, Steve Cooper approved the proposal to
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