Sir Charles Sherrington—“the William Harvey of the Nervous System”

Abstract

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, English neurophysiologist, has been called “the William Harvey of the nervous system” because his contributions to knowledge of the mammalian nervous system are comparable to those of the English physician and anatomist William Harvey (1578-1657) to knowledge of the circulatory system. In a career that spanned 69 years, Sherrington laid the foundation for understanding the integrated function of the nervous system in higher animals. This work earned him many honors and awards, including the 1932 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. He shared this prize with the English physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian (1889-1977) “for their discoveries regarding the function of neurons” in the activity of the brain and spinal cord. Sherrington investigated nearly every aspect of nervous function, and his work had a direct influence on neurosurgery and the treatment of neurologic disorders. Sherrington was born on November 27, 1857, in Islington, a suburb of London, England. He attended grammar school in Ipswich (about 60 miles northeast of London) from 1870 to 1875, after which he began medical training at St Thomas's Hospital in London. In 1879, he left his medical training and became a student at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received a BA degree in 1883, an MB degree in 1885, and an MD degree in 1892. After receiving his medical degree in 1885, Sherrington spent 2 years pursuing postgraduate work in Germany and France. In Germany, he worked with Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) in pathology and with Robert Koch (1843-1910) in bacteriology. Sherrington returned to England in 1887 and became a lecturer at St Thomas's Hospital, remaining there until 1891. In 1891, he was named professor at the University of London, and from 1891 to 1894, he also served as director of the Brown Institute for Pathological Research, a veterinary school associated with the University of London where animal diseases were studied. From 1895 to 1913, Sherrington was associated with the University of Liverpool (northwestern England) as professor of physiology, and from 1913 to his retirement in 1936, he was professor of physiology at Oxford University. However, during World War I (1914-1918), Sherrington also served at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where, as Fullerian Professor of Physiology, he helped evaluate (1916-1917) the use of antitetanus serum in battle casualties. After his retirement in 1936, Sherrington spent 2 years (1936-1938) at the University of Edinburgh. Sherrington's publications of more than 320 scientific articles and several books were concerned primarily with studies of the nervous system. In his classic book The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, published in 1906 and based on his Silliman Lectures at Yale University in New Haven, Conn, he distinguished 3 main groups of sensory organs: exteroceptors (those that detect light, sound, odor, and tactile stimuli); interoceptors (those that detect stimuli affecting internal organs; taste buds are also considered interoceptors); and proprioceptors (those that sense position). He found that reflexes must be regarded as integrated activities of the entire organism, not as the activities of isolated “reflex arcs,” a notion that was accepted at that time. In his work from 1895 to 1898, he demonstrated that when one set of muscles is stimulated, muscles opposing the action of the first set are simultaneously inhibited. This work, performed in cats, dogs, monkeys, and apes, became known as Sherrington's law (1897). Sherrington also mapped out, with greater accuracy than had been done previously, the motor areas of the cerebral cortex. This work identified the regions of the motor cortex that governed specific movements of the body. Besides receiving the Nobel Prize, Sherrington was awarded many honors, among which were honorary degrees from more than 22 universities and colleges from around the world, many awards and medals from scientific societies, a fellowship in the Royal Society of London in 1893 (he was president of the society from 1920 to 1925), and knighthood in 1922. He also wrote extensively on philosophy (Man on His Nature) and on the history of medicine and also created works of poetry. He is credited with coining the term synapse. On March 4, 1952, at the age of 94 years, Sherrington died of heart failure in Eastbourne, Sussex, in southern England on the English Channel (about 60 miles south of London). He was honored on a stamp (Scott No. 1132o) issued in 1993 by Madagascar (Malagasy).