History of Physiology

Introduction

Physiology was initially dominated by anatomy and descriptive approaches. The function of organs was deduced from their anatomy without doing experiments. Physiology only became a science when experimental approaches were used. The first true physiologist was William Harvey (1578-1657), the discoverer of the blood circulation. As a broader discipline, physiology germinated in Leyden during the early eighteenth century in the “Institutes of Medicine” of the illustrious Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738). He also wrote the first textbook of physiology, the ‘Institutiones medicae’. John Hunter (1728-1793) of London and Albrecht v. Haller (1708-1777) of Göttingen and Bern developed it into an independent branch of medicine. Haller wrote the ‘Elementa physiologiae humani’, a complete compilation of physiological knowledge and interpretation in 8 volumes.

Rigorous experimental physiology started in France in the early 19th century. In particular, François Magendie (1783-1855) in Paris became weary of explaining the unexplainable by the assumption of a vital force and, lacking better interpretations, wisely contented himself with gathering isolated facts by experimental methods and left correlations to posterity. His most prominent pupil was Claude Bernard (1813-1878), the preeminent physiologist of the 19^th century in France. Bernard had an international lab, mentoring many future physiologists, such as Willy Kühne, Peter Ludwig Panum, Louis Antoine Ranvier, Isidor Rosenthal and others.

Around the same time the German school of experimental physiology was initiated by Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858). He is often regarded as the “father of modern physiology” for his role in transforming biology and medicine from speculative philosophy into a rigorous experimental science. His achievements span several disciplines, including neurophysiology, embryology, and comparative anatomy. Between 1833 and 1840, he published the Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (Handbook of Human Physiology). It became the definitive textbook for the 19th century, synthesizing all known knowledge of chemistry, physics, and anatomy as they applied to the human body. 

Müller’s scientific method pushed the field away from “Naturphilosophie”. This philosophical school was popular in Germany at the time and saw nature as an organic whole with a “vital force”. Its members derived knowledge from reasoning not experimentation. Müller and his pupils moved physiology toward evidence-based experimentation. Müller was an excellent mentor and trained many of the preeminent scientists of the 19^th century, including: Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) , Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902, The father of modern pathology), Theodor Schwann (1810-1882, Developer of Cell Theory), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919, The father of developmental Biology), Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke (1819-1892), Albert von Kölliker (1817-1905, discoverer of mitochondria) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896, The father of electrophysiology). Equally influential as Johannes Peter Müller was Carl Ludwig (1816–1895), who was trained as an anatomist and has been called the “greatest physiology teacher of all time”. He developed many of the tools and methods of experimental physiology. Ludwig was famously unselfish. He often did the bulk of the work on experiments but refused to put his name on the final papers, allowing his students to take the full credit. His laboratory became a center for physiological research and trained many more famous physiologists (like Pavlov, Gaskell, Stirling, Bohr, Fick, Bowditch, Voit and Einthoven) than perhaps any other teacher of physiology in history.

Out of Müller’s laboratory developed the influential Berlin school of physiological materialism, led by Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Ludwig.

Teaching physiology was for the first time recognized as an integral part of the medical curriculum through the appointment of William Porterfield to a Chair of the Institutes of Medicine at Edinburgh in 1724. In 1796 Reil issued the first volume of the first journal of physiology, Archiv fur die Physiologie, which thereafter had an interrupted course under various titles until 1878. The first International Congress of Physiologists was held at Basel in 1889.