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Sir Charles Sherrington – Biography
Charles Scott Sherrington was born on November 27, 1857,
at Islington, London. He was the son of James Norton Sherrington,
of Caister, Great Yarmouth, who died when Sherrington was a young
child. Sherrington's mother later married Dr. Caleb Rose of
Ipswich, a good classical scholar and a noted archaeologist,
whose interest in the English artists of the Norwich School no
doubt gave Sherrington the interest in art that he retained
throughout his life.
In 1876 Sherrington began medical studies at St. Thomas's
Hospital and in 1878 passed the primary examination of the
Royal College
of Surgeons, and a year later the primary examination for the
Fellowship of that College. After a short stay at Edinburgh he
went, in 1879, to Cambridge as a noncollegiate student studying
physiology under Michael Foster, and in 1880 entered Gonville and Caius
College there.
In 1881 he attended a medical congress in London at which Sir
Michael Foster discussed the work of Sir Charles Bell and others
on the experimental study of the functions of nerves that was
then being done in England and elsewhere in Europe. At this
congress controversy arose about the effects of excisions of
parts of the cortex of the brains of dogs and monkeys done by
Ferrier and Goltz of Strasbourg. Subsequently, Sherrington worked
on this problem in Cambridge with Langley, and with him published, in
1884, a paper on it. In this manner Sherrington was introduced to
the neurological work to which he afterwards devoted his
life.
In 1883 Sherrington became Demonstrator of Anatomy at Cambridge
under Professor Sir George Humphrey, and during the winter
session of 1883-1884 at St. Thomas's Hospital he demonstrated
histology.
The years 1884 and 1885 were eventful ones for Sherrington, for
during the winter of 1884-1885 he worked with Goltz at
Strasbourg, in 1884 he obtained his M.R.C.S., and in 1885 a First
Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge with
distinction. During this year he published a paper of his own on
the subject of Goltz's dogs. In 1885 he also took his M.B. degree
at Cambridge and in 1886 his L.R.C.P.
In 1885 Sherrington went, as a member of a Committee of the
Association for Research in Medicine, to Spain to study an
outbreak of cholera, and in 1886 he visited the Venice district
also to investigate the same disease, the material then obtained
being examined in Berlin under the supervision of Virchow, who
later sent Sherrington to Robert
Koch for a six weeks' course in technique. Sherrington stayed
with Koch to do research in bacteriology for a year, and in 1887
he was appointed Lecturer in Systematic Physiology at St.
Thomas's Hospital, London, and also was elected a Fellow of
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1891 he was appointed
in succession to Sir Victor Horsley, Professor and Superintendent
of the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and
Pathological Research in London. In 1895 he became Professor of
Physiology at the University of Liverpool.
During his earlier years in Cambridge, Sherrington, influenced by
W. H. Gaskell and by the Spanish neurologist, Ramón y Cajal, whom he had met
during his visit to Spain, took up the study of the spinal cord.
By 1891 his mind had turned to the problems of spinal reflexes,
which were being much discussed at that time, and Sherrington
published several papers on this subject and, during 1892-1894,
others on the efferent nerve supply of muscles. Later, from
1893-1897, he studied the distribution of the segmented skin
fields, and made the important discovery that about one-third of
the nerve fibres in a nerve supplying a muscle are efferent, the
remainder being motor.
At Liverpool he returned to his earlier study of the problem of
the innervation of antagonistic muscles and showed that reflex
inhibition played an important part in this. In addition to this,
however, he was studying the connection between the brain and the
spinal cord by way of the pyramidal tract, and he was at this
time visited by the American surgeon Harvey Cushing, then a young
man, who stayed with him for eight months.
In 1906 he published his well-known book: The Integrative
Action of the Nervous System, being his Silliman Lectures
held at Yale
University the previous year, and in 1913 he was invited to
become Waynfleet Professor of Physiology at Oxford, a post for
which he had unsuccessfully applied in 1895, and here he remained
until his retirement in 1936. Here he wrote, and published in
1919, his classic book entitled Mammalian Physiology: a Course
of Practical Exercises, and here he regularly taught the
students for whom this book was written.
In physique Sherrington was a well-built, but not very tall man
with a strong constitution which enabled him to carry out
prolonged researches.
During the First World War, as Chairman of the Industrial Fatigue
Board, he worked for a time in a shell factory at Birmingham, and
the daily shift of 13 hours, with a Sunday shift of 9 hours, did
not, at the age of 57, tire him. From his early years he was
short-sighted, but he often worked without spectacles.
The predominant notes of his character as a man were his humility
and friendliness and the generosity with which he gave to others
his advice and valuable time. An interesting feature of him is
that he published, in 1925, a book of verse entitled The
Assaying of Brabantius and other Verse, which caused one
reviewer to hope that «Miss Sherrington» would publish
more verse. He was also sensitive to the music of prose, and this
and the poet in him, but also the biologist and philosopher, were
evident in his Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1933 on The Brain
and its Mechanism, in which he denied our scientific right to
join mental with physiological experience.
The philosopher in him ultimately found expression in his great
book, Man on his Nature, which was the published title of
the Gifford Lectures for 1937-1938, which Sherrington gave. As is
well known, this book, published in 1940, centres round the life
and views of the 16th century French physician Jean Fernel and
round Sherrington's own views. In 1946 Sherrington published
another volume entitled The Endeavour of Jean
Fernel.
Sherrington was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of
London in 1893, where he gave the Croonian Lecture in 1897, and
was awarded the Royal Medal in 1905 and the Copley Medal in 1927.
In 1922 the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire
and in 1924 the Order of Merit were conferred upon him. He held
honorary doctorates of the Universities of Oxford, London, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester,
Liverpool, Wales, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, Strasbourg, Louvain, Uppsala, Lyons, Budapest, Athens, Brussels,
Berne,
Toronto,
Montreal,
and Harvard.
As a boy and a young man Sherrington was a notable athlete both
at Queen Elizabeth's School, Ipswich, where he went in 1871, and
later at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, for which College
he rowed and played rugby football; he was also a pioneer of
winter sports at Grindelwald.
In 1892 Sherrington married Ethel Mary, daughter of John Ely
Wright, of Preston Manor, Suffolk. After some years of frail
health, during which, however, he remained mentally very alert,
he died suddenly of heart failure at Eastbourne in 1952.
From
Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing Company,
Amsterdam, 1965
This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel
Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Sir Charles Sherrington died on March 4, 1952.
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