Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 2198

CHARLES SCOTT SHERRINGTON (1857-1952) The integrative action of the nervous system. Scribner 1906 xvi, 411 pp., illus. 21.9 cm.

Sherrington, educated at Cambridge and professor of physiology at Liverpool and Oxford, was a man of wide interests and accomplishments: biographer, medical historian, poet, and book collector. In this classic of modern neurology, he summed up his years of experiments and observations on the nervous system and the reflexes and developed a theory that has had a far-reaching and profound influence on modern neurophysiology and clinical neurology. Briefly, his theory was that the nervous system acts as the coordinator of various parts of the body and that the reflexes are the simplest expressions of the integrative action of the nervous system, enabling the entire body to function toward one definite end at a time. Sherrington shared the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology in 1932 with Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian (1889-1977), for their work on the nervous system.

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 1432

Gift of John Martin, M.D.