Charles Scott Sherrington is considered one of the fathers of neuroscience for his contributions to neuroscience and physiology. His career path is the basis of which enabled him to have such an impact on the field of neurobiology. A primary impact is his research which led him to postulate “Sherrington’s Law”; stating that for every activated neuron of a muscle, there is a corresponding inhibition of the opposing muscle. Sherrington is also well known for naming the then-theoretical connecting point of neurons; the synapse. One of his students, John Carew Eccles, later won a Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on synapse. Sherrington also did extensive work on proprioception (the relation of one body part to another) and the neural control of posture.
Sherrington was born on November 27, 1857, in London. In 1876 Sherrington began his medical studies at St. Thomas's Hospital. In 1879 he went to Cambridge as a 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 being done in Europe. At this assembly 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. Afterward, Sherrington worked on this problem in Cambridge with Langley, and with him published a paper in 1884. This neurological work became Sherrington’s future.
In 1883 Sherrington became Demonstrator of Anatomy at Cambridge under Professor Sir George Humphrey. At St. Thomas's Hospital he demonstrated histology.
In 1884 and 1885 Sherrington 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 his own paper 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 stayed with Koch to do research in bacteriology, 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.
When he was at 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 studies had turned to current research (at the time) spinal reflexes and Sherrington published several papers on this subject and, during 1892-1894, others on the efferent nerve supply of muscles. From 1893-1897, he made the important discovery that about one-third of the nerve fibers in a nerve supplying a muscle are efferent, the rest being motor.
At Liverpool he returned to studying the antagonistic muscles and showed that inhibiting a reflex played an important part in these muscles. In addition to this, however, he was studying the connection between the brain and the spinal cord by way of the pyramidal tract. In 1906 he published the book: The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. 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. Which then in 1919 he wrote his classic book entitled Mammalian Physiology: a Course of Practical Exercises, which routinely was the text when he taught.
Sherrington received many awards during his lifetime, such as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1893, where he gave the Croonian Lecture in 1897, the Royal Medal in 1905, the Copley Medal in 1927, the 1922 Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and in 1924 the Order of Merit. His other achievements were that he held honorary doctorates from 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. Even though he remained mentally stable when was older, he died suddenly of heart failure at East Bourne, Sussex, in 1952.
Sherrington’s achievements are wide spread amongst the science community in both the 20th and 21st century. His contribution to the understanding of how neurons are connected paved the way for other scholars to further investigate the basis of the central nervous system.
References:
The Nobel Foundation. 2005. “Sir charles sherrington – biography” (December 4, 2005)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2005.“Charles Scott Sherrington”
(December 4, 2005)