Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 2254

ERNEST HENRY STARLING (1866-1927) Mercers' Company lectures on recent advances in the physiology of digestion. W. T. Keener 1906 x, 156 pp., 10 illus., 3 diagrs. 21.5 cm.

Starling studied medicine at Guy's Hospital Medical School and began his career there as a demonstrator of physiology in 1887. Soon thereafter he was appointed to a lectureship and remained at Guy's until 1899, when he accepted a professorship of physiology at University College. He resigned from University College in 1922 and accepted a research professorship at the Royal Society the following year. One of Britain's greatest physiologists, Starling made many key contributions to and discoveries in his field. He showed that serum proteins produce osmotic pressure which causes fluids to be absorbed from connective tissue spaces. Starling and Sir William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924) together discovered secretin, and Starling introduced the term hormones for such internal secretions. Starling's law of the heart resulted from his studies of the circulation with his well-known heart-lung preparation, when he found that cardiac output during each beat is directly proportional to the diastolic filling. He demonstrated that the tubules of the kidney reabsorb water, chlorides, bicarbonates and glucose and, with Bayliss, developed the law of the intestine in which local stimulation of the intestine induces contraction above and inhibition below the excited spot, thereby causing the intestinal contents to travel downward. An annual lecture series was begun at University College in 1906 to recognize a large gift from the Mercers' Company to support the work of the Physiological Department. Starling initiated the series with these ten lectures on recent advances in the physiology of digestion.