Charles Scott Sherrington, English Physiologist
Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952) was an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s. In 1881 Sherrington began his work in neurological research when he performed a histological examination of the right hemisphere of a dog's brain to help prove David Ferrier's belief that there was localization of function in the brain. In 1885 he traveled to Rudolf Virchow in Berlin to inspect the cholera specimens he procured in Spain. Virchow sent Sherrington to Robert Koch for a six weeks course in technique and he ended up staying with Koch for a year to do research in bacteriology. In 1891, Sherrington was appointed as superintendent of the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and Pathological Research of the University of London where he worked on segmental distribution of the spinal dorsal and ventral roots, mapped the sensory dermatomes, and in 1892 discovered that muscle spindles initiated the stretch reflex. In 1895 he was given full-professorship with his appointment as Holt Professor of Physiology at Liverpool where he worked on cats, dogs, monkeys, and apes that had been deprived of their cerebral hemispheres. He found that reflexes must be considered integrated activities of the total organism, not just the result of activities of the so-called reflex-arcs, a concept then generally accepted. In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology, won jointly with Edgar Adrian for their work on the function of neurons. Sherrington's mental faculties were crystal clear up to the time of his death, which was caused by a sudden heart failure and ended his life instantly. He died in 1952 at the age of 94
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