Before the 1870s American physiology, the study of how living organisms function and maintain life, was not research based. The laboratory model was imported from Germany during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by American students who studied there. So strong was the German influence that of the thirty-one Europeantrained founding members of the American Physiological Society (1887), twenty-eight had been trained at German universities. Virtually all the leading American physiologists of the 1890s were trained at the Leipzig laboratory of Carl Ludwig (1816-1895), whose personable, friendly style was more attractive to young Americans than the more typical hard-nosed and imperious demeanor of other leading German scientists.

Following the German Model.

All the American scientists who studied in Germany were greatly impressed by the well-appointed experimental facilities— "an endless array of machines, frogs, dogs" —as William James described a laboratory in Berlin. The...