Sherrington's concept of integrative action

Abstract

In one of the most sustainedly productive careers in the annals of science, his writings covering a span of sixty-nine years, the English neurophysiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (18591952) "almost singlehandedly crystallized the special field of neurophysiology."l Sherrington's classic investigations dealt primarily with reflex motor behavior in vertebrates, and with the nature of muscle management at the spinal level. The data, terms, and concepts which he introduced have become such a fundamental part of the neurosciences that it is perhaps not surprising their authorship is often forgotten. The neurophysiologist works daily with terms such as proprioceptive, nociceptive, recruitment, fractionation, occlusion, myotatic, neurone pool, motoneurone, and synapse, and with concepts such as the final common path, the motor unit, the neurone threshold, central excitatory and inhibitory states, proprioception, reciprocal innervation, and the integrative action of the nervous system. But seldom is he aware that these core contributions to his discipline were largely the work of one man, Charles Sherrington. The span of Sherrington's career and the scope of his empirical and conceptual contributions offer the historian a broad canvas for tracing the development of present-day knowledge about the physiology of the nervous system. The two major concerns of this study are, first, to analyze the development of the integrative action concept in Sherrington's work from 1884 to 1906 and, secondly, to consider the significance of the integrative action concept for the development of neurophysiology. These lines of inquiry have raised many of the types of questions to which biologists or historians of biology want answers. First, and perhaps most obviously, just what does the phrase "the integrative action of the nervous system" denote?