History of Anatomy and Physiology: the Science of Medicine
After the Enlightenment, most anatomical studies were conducted in the interest of physiology. That is, because the main structures of the body were already sufficiently known, the focus of research shifted toward learning the functions of these structures and toward seeing smaller structures, such as cells, in terms of their functions.
Although considered a charlatan by many for his popular promotions of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was a preeminent neuroanatomist and an expert dissector. His findings laid the basis for the modern study of cerebral localization. The rapid advance of neuroscience in the nineteenth century was largely due to Luigi Rolando (1773-1831); Charles Bell (1774-1842); Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776-1847); Pierre Flourens (1794-1867); Anders Adolf Retzius (1796-1860); Johannes Müller (1801-1858); Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who studied the speed of nerve impulses; Wilhelm His, Sr. (1831-1904); Eduard Hitzig (1838-1907); Gustav Theodor Fritsch (1838-1927); David Ferrier (1843-1928), who mapped the motor cortex; Camillo Golgi (1844-1926); Paul Emil Flechsig (1847-1929); Carl Wernicke (1848-1905); Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952); and Franz Nissl (1860-1919).
Neuroscientific giants of the twentieth century include Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who discovered the conditioned reflex; Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934); Henry Head (1861-1940); Otto Loewi (1873-1961); Walter Rudolf Hess (1881-1973); and John Carew Eccles (1903-1997).
The neurophysiology of vision, hearing, and speech was investigated by Bartolomeo Panizza (1785-1867), Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), Frans Cornelis Donders (1818-1889), Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880), and Georg von Békésy (1899-1972).
Modern cell science, cytology, began in 1805, when Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) asserted that all life forms consist of cells. In the 1820s René-Joachim-Henri Dutrochet (1776-1847) further developed Oken's claim, Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) discovered the ovum, and Robert Brown (1773-1858) discovered the nucleus. In the 1830s, Dutrochet named osmosis. Other major early contributors to the knowledge of cells include Jan Evangelista Purkyne (1787-1869); Martin Barry (1802-1855); Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809-1885), who wrote the first textbook of histology; Theodor Schwann (1810-1882), who coined the word "metabolism"; Robert Remak (1815-1865); and Albert von Kölliker (1817-1905). Hugo von Mohl (1805-1872) pioneered the study of cell division, Walther Flemming (1843-1905) discovered chromosomes, and Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) identified mitosis. Karl Bogislaus Reichert (1811-1883) combined cell science with embryology and Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) invented cellular pathology.
Modern gastrophysiology began when American military surgeon William Beaumont (1785-1853) was able to observe directly the digestive processes of his patient, Alexis St. Martin, whose abdominal gunshot wound exposed the interior of his stomach. The radically materialistic metabolic and gastrophysiological theories of Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893) prompted the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) to satirize him by coining the expression, "You are what you eat." Knowledge of digestion was further enhanced by Walter Bradford Cannon (1871-1945).
Among the landmarks of physiological instrumentation are the invention of the stethoscope by René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781-1826), the improvement of the string galvanometer and the inventions of the electrocardiograph (EKG) and the phonocardiograph by Willem Einthoven (1860-1927), the invention of the slit-lamp ophthalmoscope by Alvar Gullstrand (1862-1930), the development of the electron microscope by Max Knoll (1879-1969) and Ernst Ruska (1906-1988), and the preparation of the first human electroencephalogram (EEG) by Johannes Berger (1873-1941). Josef Skoda (1805-1881) and Austin Flint, Sr. (1812-1886) improved the diagnostic capabilities of the stethoscope. Hans Eppinger (1879-1946) was among those who best exploited the EKG in clinical and physiological research.
Two Frenchmen, François Magendie (1783-1855) and Claude Bernard (1813-1878), are often known as the fathers of modern physiology. John Call Dalton (1825-1889) was the first prominent American physiologist, and Austin Flint Jr. (1836-1915) followed in his footsteps. But a German, Eduard Pflüger (1829-1910), was the most prominent general physiologist of his day. In 1868 he founded Archiv für die gesamte Physiologie (Archives of All Physiology), better known simply as Pflügers Archiv. He was merciless in his criticism of other physiologists.
Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) and Robert Koch (1843-1910) laid the foundations of biochemistry. Some biochemical milestones with physiological significance are the synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882); the spectral analysis of body fluids by Karl Vierordt (1818-1884); the careers of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915); the discovery of insulin by Frederick Grant Banting (1891-1941), Charles Herbert Best (1899-1978), and James Bertram Collip (1892-1965); the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming (1881-1955); the discovery of the citric acid cycle by Hans Adolf Krebs (1900-1981); and the determination of the amino acid sequence of insulin by Frederick Sanger (b. 1918). Following the hematological research of Ernst Hoppe-Seyler (1825-1895) and the discovery of hemoglobin by Otto Funke (1828-1879), Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943) investigated blood agglutination and identified the four human blood types.
In endocrinology, Paul Langerhans (1847-1888) with the pancreas, Victor Horsley (1857-1916) and Edward Calvin Kendall (1886-1972) with the thyroid, Artur Biedl (1869-1933) with the adrenal glands, and Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) with the pituitary all made significant progress. Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817-1894) performed research on internal secretions, or hormones, that led to the science of hormonology. John Jacob Abel (1857-1938) prepared the way for Jokichi Takamine (1854-1922) and Thomas Bell Aldrich (1861-1939) to isolate the hormone epinephrine, later called adrenalin. William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924) advanced the knowledge of hormonal chemistry and wrote a key textbook on chemical physiology. With Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927), he isolated the hormone secretin in the duodenum.
Casimir Funk (1884-1967) discovered several substances necessary for life. Since they are all in the amine group of chemicals, he combined "amine" with the Latin word vita ("life") to name them "vitamines," later shortened to "vitamins." Further pioneer research on vitamins was conducted by Elmer Verner McCollum (1879-1967), Herbert McLean Evans (1882-1971), Katharine Scott Bishop (1889-1976), and Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1987).
The physiology of genetics made great strides after Wilhelm Hertwig (1849-1922) observed that fertilization is the uniting of the nuclei of the male and female gametes. Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene (1869-1940), Oswald Theodore Avery (1877-1955), Colin Munro Macleod (1909-1972), Maclyn McCarty (b. 1911), and especially Francis Harry Compton Crick (b. 1916) and James Dewey Watson (b. 1928) produced the scientific understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as the carrier of genetic code. Katherine Koontz Sanford (b. 1915) achieved the first successful cloning of mammalian tissue cells. John Rock (1890-1984) fertilized human ova in vitro.
The anatomy textbook of Henry Gray (1825-1861) has been standard since its first appearance in 1858. Jean Cruveilhier (1791-1874) and Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold (1804-1885) respectively advanced pathological anatomy and comparative anatomy. Joszef Hyrtl (1810-1894), Eduard Pernkopf (1888-1955), and Frank Netter (1906-1991) each created beautiful anatomical atlases, but Pernkopf's has been severely criticized because he dissected victims of Nazi concentration camp murders and promoted Nazism in his book.
As a science, human anatomy is now essentially complete. What little remains to be learned is at or below the molecular level and is closely tied to physiology. The wave of the future in physiology is medical genetics, which tries to fathom the origins, manifestations, and meaning of individual human differences and involves research in cloning, gene therapy, gene regeneration, tissue regeneration, recombinant DNA, genetic engineering, stem cells, and the mapping of the human genome. A branch of medical genetics called genomics identifies and characterizes genes and their arrangement in chromosomes.
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