Abstract
Anniversaries have a way of eliciting from those who celebrate them an epitome, a summary judgment, of the past. The banquet celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Physiological Society (APS), held in 1938, was no exception. Warren Plimpton Lombard, eighty-two years old and the retired professor of physiology at the University of Michigan, spoke to the assembled Society and engaged in a bit of reminiscence:
In ‘85 I came back from Ludwig’s laboratory in Leipzig; like any other young man I was full of aspiration; I wanted to teach physiology and above all I wanted to get into a good laboratory where I could do some research work, because in Ludwig’s laboratory I caught the disease.1
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Notes
William H. Howell and Charles W. Greene History of the American Physiological Society: Semicentennial 1887–1937 (Baltimore, MD: American Physiological Society, 1938), p. 197.
Ibid., p. 56. The quotation is from Article 4 (of 13) in the Society’s constitution, as adopted by the founding meeting at the Physiological Laboratory, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, Friday, 30 December 1887.
Howell, “The American Physiological Society During its First Twenty-Five Years,” in Howell and Greene, History, pp. 1-89; quote from p. 3.
For general overviews of the history of American physiology in the nineteenth century see: Edward C. Atwater, “`Squeezing Mother Nature’: Experimental Physiology in the United States Before 1870,” Bull. Hist. Med. 52 (1978): 313–335; Karl E. Rothschuh, History of Physiology,trans. and ed. Guenter B. Risse (Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1973), pp. 187–190; C. I. Reed, “The Maturation of Physiology in America After 1830,” Physiologist 5 (1962): 35–41; Walter J. Meek, “The Beginnings of American Physiology,” Ann. Med. Hist. 10 (1928): 111–125; Henry Sewall, “The Beginnings of Physiological Research in America,” Science 58 (1923): 187–195.
See, for example, the curricula discussed in William Frederick Norwood Medical Education in the United States Before the Civil War (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1944).
Anna Robinson Burr Weir Mitchell: His Life and Letters (New York: Duffield, 1929), p. 97.
S. Weir Mitchell, “Biographical Memoir of John Call Dalton,” Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 3 (1895): 179–185, esp. p. 181.
For an overview see Rothschuh, History of Physiology pp. 150–155, 264–275.
Burr, Weir Mitchell pp. 61–68.
Given below in the quote from Mitchell’s obituary of Dalton.
William F. Bynum, “Mitchell, Silas Weir,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1974), p. 422.
Mitchell, “Dalton,” p. 181.
Ibid., and Frederic L. Holmes, “Dalton, John Call,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), pp. 107–110.
Burr, Weir Mitchell, pp. 68–121; Mitchell’s disappointments are well detailed and analyzed in W. Bruce Fye, “S. Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia’s `Lost’ Physiologist,” Bull. Hist. Med. 57 (1983): 188–202.
Most of Bowditch’s notebooks and correspondence pertaining to his European study are in the Harvard Medical Archives, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (hereafter, CL-HMS), Boston, MA. Notebooks are in CL-HMS, GA 9; the relatively few letters to Bowditch are in CL-HMS C 5.2, while in CL-HMS C 5.1 are to be found the multitudinous letters he wrote home to his mother, Lucy Orne [Nichols] Bowditch, his father, Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch, and his uncle, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (hereafter, Bowditch Papers). Typed extracts and/or summaries of many of the letters were made in the early twentieth century by Bowditch’s son, Harold Bowditch, presumably with an eye toward writing a biography of his father; no such work was ever published. The correspondence was used, although often without specific citation, by Walter B. Cannon, “Henry Pickering Bowditch,” Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 17 (1922): 183–196. See also Frederick W. Ellis, “Henry Pickering Bowditch and the Development of the Harvard Laboratory of Physiology,” New Eng. J. Med. 219 (1938): 819–828; Everett Mendelsohn, “Bowditch, Henry Pickering,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), pp. 365–368. Bowditch’s early training and call to Harvard are well treated in Fye, “Why a Physiologist?-The Case of Henry P. Bowditch,” Bull. Hist. Med. 56 (1982): 19–29.
J. M. D. Olmsted Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard: A Nineteenth Century Neurologist and Endocrinologist (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), pp. 129–130.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 29 September 1868, Bowditch Papers.
Brown-Séquard to H. P. Bowditch, 1 October 1868; H. P. Bowditch to J. I. Bowditch, 1 October 1868; H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 4 October 1868, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 4 October 1868, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 15 October 1868 [portion of letter written 1 November 1868 ], Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 22 and 30 November 1868; H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 13 December 1868, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to J. I. Bowditch, 6 December 1868, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 13 December 1868, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 26 January 1869, Bowditch Papers.
Cf. his long summaries of Bernard’s ideas, H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 26 January and 21 March 1869, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to Jeffries Wyman, 14 January 1869; cited in Fye, “Why a Physiologist?” p. 23.
For an overview of the place of scientific research in French institutions in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study ( Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971 ), pp. 88–107.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 26 January 1869 [portion dated 8 February 1869 ], Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to J. I. Bowditch, 12 February 1869, Bowditch Papers.
Ibid.; the book is Paul Joseph Lorain, De la Réforme des Études Médicales par les Laboratoires (Paris: 1868).
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 21 March 1869, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 14 March 1869, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to H. I. Bowditch, 12 April 1869, Bowditch Papers.
This sample of physiological scientists is drawn from a larger prosopographic project now in progress. Because the focus of the project is medicine and the medical sciences, the larger population includes (1) all scientists with an M.D., regardless of field and (2) all Ph.D.s and equivalents in medical science subjects, as long as they were either trained or functioned within a medical environment. This would exclude, for example, dairy or soil bacteriologists, agricultural biochemists, and “physiologists” who were purely biological both in training and in employment. The grouping defined as physiological scientists includes the subject categories of: physiology; other physiological areas such as applied physiology; physiological chemistry; biochemistry or biological chemistry; other biochemical fields such as nutrition; pharmacology; and toxicology. The word “individual” is used here to mean a person with a given subject identifier. Because a minority of persons would give two or (rarely) three subjects, such a person might be counted twice in subject-related cross tabulations. Abel, for example, listed his subjects as “Pharmacology, Physiological Chemistry”; Chittenden listed his as “Physiological Chemistry, Physiology.”
Average age, 25.7 years; N,29 (excludes Martin and Meltzer); SD 3 years.
First phase (1860–1884), 25.3 years; N,19. Second phase (1885–1899), 25.8 years; N,35. Third phase (1900–1914), 28.3 years; N,32.
William James to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 17 September 1867, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly, 1920 ), p. 101.
J. I. Bowditch to H. P. Bowditch, 22 March 1871, Bowditch Papers.
Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler ( New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946 ), p. 114.
Thomas Neville Bonner, American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual Relations, 1870–1914 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963); on the attractiveness of the clinical centers of Vienna and Berlin, esp. pp. 69–106.
Florence Rena Sabin, Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934 ), pp. 30–64.
Horace W. Davenport, “Physiology, 1850–1923: The View From Michigan,” Physiologist 25 suppl. 1 (1982): 50; for the best treatment of Lombard’s life and work, see 50–76.
On the attention paid to the University of Strassburg, see J. E. Craig, “A Mission for German Learning: The University of Strassburg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1918” ( Ph.D. diss., Stanford Univ., 1973 ).
Simon Flexner and James Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (New York: Viking, 1941), pp. 78–90, 140–145; the transition is also discussed in Owsei Temkin, “The European Background of the Young Dr. Welch,” Bull. Hist. Med. 24 (1950): 308–318, esp. 308–312.
Hubert B. Vickery, “Russell Henry Chittenden, 1856–1943,” Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 24 (1947): 59–104, esp. 65–66. Vickery, who was Chittenden’s pupil and friend, cites the story of the brief and unhappy sojourn in Strassburg from Chittenden’s The Development of Physiological Chemistry in the United States (New York: Chemical Catalogue, 1930), p. 30, although it is not to be found in Chittenden’s manuscript autobiography, “Sixty Years of Service in Science: An Autobiography” (1936) in the Chittenden Papers, Yale University, Sterling Library, Department of Manuscripts and Archives, manuscript group 611, box 2, folder 35.
Gerald Webb and Desmond Powell, Henry Sewall, Physiologist and Physician ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946 ), pp. 45–50.
Average, 2.69 destinations per person; N,29.
Average, 2.82 years abroad; N,29.
Average, 1.54 years elapsed since doctoral degree; N,22. N is smaller because some travelers, for example James, Hall, Warren, and Minot, went abroad before their doctorates, and were excluded to avoid having them be tallied as a negative elapsed time.
Frederic Schiller Lee, “Über die elektrischen Erscheinungen, welche die Muskelzuckung begleiten,” Arch. Physiol. (1887): 204–223; cf. his reflections on his teacher in Lee, “Carl Ludwig,” Science n.s., 1 (1895): 630–632.
Henry Herbert Donaldson, “Memories for My Boys” (1931), MS autobiography in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 78–87; the standard published biography is Edwin G. Conklin, “Henry Herbert Donaldson, 1857–1938,” Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 20 (1938–1939): 229–243.
Lewellys F. Barker, Time and the Physician ( New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942 ), pp. 5761
Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet ( Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972 ), pp. 80–89.
William D. MacNider, “John Jacob Abel, 1857–1938,” Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 24 (1947): 231–257. Abel’s notebooks from his studies in Germany are in the Abel Papers, Johns Hopkins Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD, boxes 66–69 (hereafter, Abel Papers).
For brief overviews of the economic transformation of Germany see, for example, Theodore S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), esp. pp. 3–20, 199–255; or Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 322, 122–129, and 367–390.
See Charles E. McClelland, State, Society and University in Germany, 1700–1914 ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980 ).
On the “enrollment explosion” in nineteenth-century German universities, see Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 23–77.
McClelland, State, Society and University in Germany.
On the origins of a research tradition in German universities see R. Steven Turner, “The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818 to 1848—Causes and Context,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 3 (1971): 137–182.
On the growth of medical disciplines in nineteenth-century Germany see: Hans-Heinz Eulner, Die Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer an den Universitäten des Deutschen Sprachgebietes (Stuttgart, FRG: Ferdinand Enke, 1970 ); Ben-David, Scientist’s Role in Society, pp. 108–138; and A. Zloczower, Career Opportunities and the Growth of Scientific Discovery in 19th Century Germany, With Special Reference to Physiology (Jerusalem, Israel: Hebrew Univ., ca. 1960 ).
Information derived from Eulner, Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer,pp. 52, 54, 58, and 61.
William Henry Welch to Emma Welch Walcott (sister), 18 November 1876, Welch Papers, Johns Hopkins Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD (hereafter, Welch Papers).
On the development of facilities for physiology in Germany, see Eulner, Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer,pp. 46–65; also Rothschuh, History of Physiology,pp. 152–153.
W. James to Thomas W. Ward, ca. November 1867, Letters, p. 118; Ibid., W. James to H. P. Bowditch, 12 December 1867, p. 121.
Ibid., W. James to Henry James (father), 5 September 1867, p. 98; ibid., W. James to O. W. Holmes, Jr., 17 September 1867, p. 100.
Ibid., W. James to H. P. Bowditch, 12 December 1867, p. 121.
Ibid., W. James to Ward, ca. November 1867, p. 118.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 23 May 1869, Bowditch Papers.
Ibid., H. P. Bowditch to J. I. Bowditch, 19 July 1869.
H. P. Bowditch [letter from Leipzig, 8 March 1870 ], Boston Med. Stag. J. 82 (21 April 1870): 305–307.
Ibid., p. 306.
Ibid.
John Jacob Abel to Frances Hinman, 25 October 1884, Abel Papers, box 62.
Chittenden, “Sixty Years,” pp. 22–23.
Warren P. Lombard, “The Life and Work of Carl Ludwig,” Science 44 (1916): 363–375, quote on 369.
Bowditch, [letter from Leipzig], 307.
W. James to H. P. Bowditch, 12 December 1867, Letters,p. 121.
W. H. Welch to William Wickham Welch (father), 25 February 1877, Welch Papers.
On Ludwig see Heinz Schröer, Carl Ludwig: Begründer der messenden Experimentalphysiologie, 1816–1895 (Stuttgart, FRG: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1967); on the invention and development of the kymograph, esp. pp. 104–114.
Biographical information on Marey is neither plentiful nor certain. The trip to Germany before 1860, and Marey’s acquaintance with Ludwig, are mentioned in the obituary in Br. Med. J. i (28 May 1904): 1289–1290. The anonymous writer mistakenly places Ludwig in Leipzig, although he did not move there from Vienna until 1865. Marey’s major statement on the graphic method was La Méthode Graphique dans les Sciences Expérimentales et Principalement en Physiologie et en Médicine (Paris: Masson, 1878), although he had been developing many of the same ideas for almost two decades before 1878.
Ross, Hall, G. Stanley Hall to W. James, ca. December 1878, pp. 81–82.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 7 November 1869, Bowditch Papers.
Lombard, “Ludwig,” 366.
Philip Bard to E. M. K. Geiling, 28 December 1961, Abel Papers, box 124.
Lombard, “Ludwig,” 367.
W. H. Welch to W. W. Welch, 18 October 1876; W. H. Welch to E. W. Walcott, 18 November 1876, Welch Papers.
Sabin, Mall,pp. 56–59.
Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist ( New York: Appleton, 1923 ), p. 205.
Lombard, “Ludwig,” 369; Davenport, “View from Michigan,” pp. 52–54.
Mary Hinman Abel to Frances Hinman, 31 October 1884, Abel Papers.
Sabin, Mall,pp. 60–61.
Ibid., pp. 60–64.
Cited from quotation of letter from Ludwig to Bleile, n.d., in Anton W. Oelgoetz, -Those Were Thrilling Days,”‘ Ohio State Med. J. 36 (1940): 873–877, citation on 873.
Lombard, “Ludwig,” 369.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 26 September 1869, Bowditch Papers.
Lombard, “Ludwig,” 368.
M. H. Abel to Katharine Daniels, 22 October 1884, Abel Papers, box 62.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 24 and 31 October 1869, Bowditch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 28 November 1869, Bowditch Papers.
W. H. Welch to E. W. Walcott, 18 November 1876, Welch Papers.
H. P. Bowditch to L. O. Bowditch, 13 March 1870, Bowditch Papers.
W. H. Welch to E. W. Walcott, 12 March 1877, Welch Papers.
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), esp. pp. 93–120.
W. H. Welch to Emily S. Welch (mother), 20 July 1877, Welch Papers.
Cf. Welch’s remark that, because an American “is something of a rarity in Breslau,” he was receiving much more attention from Julius Cohnheim than might otherwise be the case, W. H. Welch to E. S. Welch, 15 May 1877, Welch Papers.
Cf. the testimonial from Ludwig for Bleile in Oelgoetz, “Thrilling Days,” 875.
See Eulner, Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer, pp. 46–138.
A good introduction to the issues involved in American higher education in this period may be found in the essays in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979 ).
On Bowditch’s negotiations, see Fye, “Why a Physiologist?” pp. 26–29.
For a participant’s description of that laboratory, see Ellis, “Henry Pickering Bowditch.”
For the development of laboratories at Harvard and Columbia, see chapter III by Alejandra C. Laszlo in this book.
See, for example, Bowditch’s notebook kept in the summer of 1879 (CL-HMS GA 9), and the letters, numbering almost fifty, that he wrote back home to his wife in the summer of 1880 from Paris, Heidelberg, Würzburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden, London, and Cambridge (CL-HMS C 5. 1 ).
See K. J. Franklin, “A Short History of the International Congresses of Physiologists,” Ann. Sci. 3 (1938): 241–335.
Ibid., 258–261; “The Triennial International Congress of Physiologists: Fourth Meeting,” Nature Lond. 58 (15 September 1898): 481–486.
H. P. Bowditch to Selma Knauth Bowditch, 1 August 1880, Bowditch Papers.
Cf. Minot’s reports on German biology as a way of stimulating emulation on the part of Americans: “The Study of Zoology in Germany. I. The Laboratories. II. The Methods Used in Histology and Embryology,” Am. Nat. 11 (1877): 330–336, 392–406; On Bowditch, see Cannon, “Bowditch,” 192–193; On Lee see chapter III by Laszlo in this book.
On Welch as a fund-raiser, see Flexner and Flexner, Welch, pp. 234–296; also Donald Fleming, William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1954 ), pp. 131–202.
Dr. Long’s phrase occurred in discussion at the conference at which these papers were read, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, January 1986.
H. P. Bowditch, “Über die Eigenthümlichkeiten der Reizbarkeit welch die Muskelfasern des Herzens zeigen,” Arbeiten aus der physiologischen Anstalt zu Leipzig 6 (1871): 652–689; H. P. Bowditch, “Ueber den Nachweis der Unermüdlichkeit der Säugethiernerven,” Arch. Physiol. (1890): 505–508.
Cannon, “Bowditch,” 188–194. The range of Bowditch’s activities may be seen very clearly in a reprint that gathers together all of his publications. I. Bernard Cohen, ed., The Life and Writings of Henry Pickering Bowditch: An Original Anthology, 2 vols. (New York: Arno, 1980 ).
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Frank, R.G. (1987). American Physiologists in German Laboratories, 1865–1914. In: Geison, G.L. (eds) Physiology in the American Context 1850–1940. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7528-6_2
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