Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society
426
Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society
426Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630953 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1471 |
| Pages: | 426 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology
The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society
By Gerald L. Geison
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08197-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In truth, the more closely men are studied, the more elusive they become. The visual field narrows in proportion to the sharpness of our gaze. The forest fades when we regard a tree. The particular inevitably destroys the general. Sir Michael Foster was a power in the development of physiology, but the secret of his influence is not to be found in the data of the biographical dictionary. His strength lay rather in temperament, in felicity of choice, and in the admirable co-ordination of qualities in themselves of sound but not surpassing excellence.
W. T. P[orter] (1907)
Original thinkers and investigators do not therefore represent the only type of university professor. They will always be the distinguished figures; theirs will usually be the most profound and far-reaching influence. But even universities, modern universities, need and use men of different stamp — teachers whose own contributions to learning are of less importance than their influence in stimulating students or their resourcefulness in bringing together the researches of others. Michael Foster was not the less a great university professor, though he was not himself a great original thinker: in subtle ways that defy expression, he created the great Cambridge school of physiology.
Abraham Flexner (1930)
Just over a a century ago, in May 1870, the Master and Senior Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, appointed Michael Foster praelector in physiology. Although Foster may have been wanted chiefly for collegiate rather than university purposes, he brought with him a broader vision and more ambitious aims. During the nineteenth century, no single appointment was to have greater importance for the development of the biological sciences in the English universities. It was the leading event in the revival of the great English physiological tradition inaugurated by William Harvey in the seventeenth century and represented by Stephen Hales in the next, but which in the course of the nineteenth century had faded into dormancy.
By the middle of the last century, English physiology had become a stagnant backwater rather than a major tributary flowing into the mainstream. Physiology remained in the hands of amateurs, outside the universities, while in France and especially in Germany it was becoming established as a professional pursuit in university laboratories. England simply had no physiologists to compare with Claude Bernard in France or Carl Ludwig in Germany.
At the time of Foster's appointment, there was in England no independent professorship in physiology, no journal devoted exclusively to it, and no independent recognition of it in the various sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Still the leading English textbook on the subject was William Benjamin Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology, first published in 1842. Although generally sensible, this work never attained the international reputation or influence of Johannes Muller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1834-1840) or of Carl Ludwig's Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Mensehen (first edition, 1852-1854).
While on the Continent physiology had become a rigorous experimental science, it remained in England largely submerged in anatomy and in essentially religio-philosophical concerns. Antivivisection sentiment also ran peculiarly high there, further contributing to the stagnancy of physiology. In all of England, there was but one small and inadequate laboratory where experimental physiology was regularly taught. And even this laboratory — at University College London — had been organized only in the late 1860's, largely under the influence of Foster himself, who had been brought there as instructor in practical physiology and histology just four years before accepting the praelectorship at Trinity College. With the partial exception of William Sharpey, Foster's mentor at University College, no one in England was teaching physiology as it was then being taught on the Continent.
Yet by the time Foster died in 1907, English physiology had not only rejoined the mainstream, but in several important areas actually led the way. On a visit to England in 1895, the German-trained physiologist T. W. Engelmann perceived a new "young species of physiologist," a species that would soon repair the neglect into which English physiology had fallen during the first seventy-five years of the century. "We will," he wrote, "learn much from them." In 1902, the future Nobel laureate Otto Loewi came from Marburg to England in order to study with the "world-renowned physiologists" now abundant there, believing that Germany had "little by little lost its leadership to England." This renaissance can scarcely be ascribed entirely to Foster's influence, but he was its most important leader. Among contemporaries, only John Scott Burdon Sanderson even approached him in the breadth and strength of his influence on English physiology.
Foster exerted his most profound influence at Cambridge. Under his inspiration and direction, the Cambridge School of Physiology became the leading center for physiological research in the English-speaking world and a school of international renown. H. Newell Martin, Walter Holbrook Gaskell, John Newport Langley, Sir Walter Morley Fletcher, Sir Joseph Barcroft, T. R. Elliott, and Nobel laureates Sir Charles Sherrington and Sir Henry Dale — these are only the most famous of the physiologists trained at Cambridge during Foster's years there. Foster retired in 1903, but his influence persisted long after through his students, notably Gaskell, who served until 1914 as university lecturer in physiology, and Langley, who succeeded Foster as professor of physiology and held the chair until 1925, to be succeeded in turn by Barcroft. Throughout this period, the continued success and growing fame of the Cambridge School of Physiology depended very largely on Foster's intellectual sons and grandsons. As founder and director of this school, Foster surely deserves to be ranked with Johannes Müller and Carl Ludwig as one of the three greatest teachers of physiology in the nineteenth century.
But Foster's influence was by no means confined to physiology. In other branches of biology, too, he inspired or encouraged men who later occupied important Cambridge posts. They include embryologist Francis Maitland Balfour; pathologist Charles Smart Roy; morphologists Adam Sedgwick and Arthur Shipley; psychologist James Ward; anthropologist A. C. Haddon; botanists Sydney Vines, Marshall Ward, and Francis Darwin; and physiological chemists Arthur Sheridan Lea and Sir William Bate Hardy. In the 1890's Foster led the fight for the establishment of a scientific school of agriculture at Cambridge. In 1898, he persuaded Frederick Gowland Hopkins to bring the new biochemistry. Hopkins soon produced important work on muscular metabolism and vitamins, winning a Nobel prize for the latter, and went on to become founder and director of the Cambridge School of Biochemistry, serving as professor from 1914 to 1943.
As the fame of its scientific faculty spread, the Cambridge Medical School grew apace. By 1900, from a moribund state in 1870, it had become probably the largest medical school in England. For his part in this spectacular rise, Foster has been included among "the great triumvirate" of the late nineteenth-century revival. Across the entire range of biomedical studies, much of the luster of this golden era at Cambridge was due to Foster and to those who were in one way or another his students and protégés.
Those whom Foster sent out into the larger world were scarcely less distinguished. Archibald Liversidge left Cambridge to become professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney from 1872 to 1909. Henry Head became a renowned practitioner and teacher of neurology. From 1892 to 1919, John George Adami enjoyed a distinguished career as professor of pathology and bacteriology at McGill University in Montreal. In 1876, H. Newell Martin became first professor of biology at newly established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and thus carried to the United States the methods and style of teaching he had learned from Foster and T. H. Huxley. The Hopkins became in turn the training ground for many of the leaders of the next generation of American biologists, physiologists, and geneticists. Even today many British and American biologists and physiologists can trace their intellectual ancestry back to Foster.
In addition to his work as teacher, Foster made immense contributions to the organization and professionalization of physiology and other sciences. He wrote the useful section on nerve and muscle for Burdon Sanderson's Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (1873), the first such work in English and a favorite target of the antivivisectionists. A leading force in the founding of the British Physiological Society (1876), the first such society in the world, Foster also founded in 1878 and edited until 1894 the still active Journal of Physiology, the first English-language periodical devoted exclusively to physiology. Of his several manuals, the best known and most influential was A Textbook of Physiology (first edition, 1876). Distinguished by its graceful style, evolutionary perspective, and balanced discussion of unsettled physiological problems, Foster's textbook quickly became the leading work of its kind in English. Before 1900 it had gone through six English editions and part of a seventh and had been translated into Italian, German, and Russian.
Long an outspoken advocate of greater public support for science, Foster became biological secretary to the Royal Society in 1881. Like Huxley, whom he succeeded, Foster used this powerful post to promote a closer partnership between the Society and the government and to secure research grants for those he thought worthy. Not everyone, not even all scientists, shared Foster's priorities and some disliked his manner of achieving his aims. Perhaps too fond of the trappings of power, he held onto his post until 1903, and the belief that he had served beyond the point of effectiveness was general enough for the Royal Society to pass a bylaw limiting the tenure of its secretaries.
Foster sat on several important governmental commissions, chairing the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis in 1901. He was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1899, the same year he was made baronet. He played an important role in the founding of the International Association of Academies, the International Catalogue of Scientific Papers, and the International Physiological Congresses, the first of which was held in 1889 and at the fifth of which (in 1901) he was elected permanent honorary president. The English public perhaps knew him best as Member of Parliament for the University of London from 1900 to 1906. In this capacity, as in his post at the Royal Society, Foster did not win universal admiration. Whether out of principle or political naiveté, he switched parties in the middle of his term. Having run as a Liberal Unionist because of that party's opposition to Irish home rule, he crossed the aisle to join the Liberals because of their position on education. For this act of desertion, he was criticized, indeed caricatured, as a muddle-headed man of divided loyalties, and he lost his bid for reelection in 1906.
Few men can have led so interesting a career and yet received so little attention. Since Foster was certainly one of the most important and powerful forces in Victorian science, it is astonishing that he escaped enshrinement in the Life and Letters genre so popular in his time. He is perhaps best remembered today for his biography of Claude Bernard (1899) and for his book of lectures on the history of physiology (1901). Never a prolific contributor to the physiological literature, Foster published no research papers after 1876, and his name is attached to no significant scientific discovery. He is somewhat better known for his achievements as teacher, organizer, and administrator; but these are elusive talents, and it has in the end remained something of a mystery how he came to found such an impressive school of research biologists and physiologists.
To solve this mystery, it is necessary first to understand the intellectual climate and the social and institutional setting in which Foster lived and worked. It would be impossible to recognize what was distinctive in his approach without some awareness of the state of English physiology before 1870. And since Foster was above all else an educator, it is particularly important to understand the nature of English medical and scientific education before he came upon the scene. If the students who took Foster's courses found them a revelation, it can only have been by comparison with what had gone before.
But medical and scientific education in Victorian England were part of a more general educational setting, so that the history of teaching in physiology is but a chapter in the history of English education. The celebrated "reform" of the English universities had really only begun when Foster arrived at Cambridge in 1870. Scientific education, in particular, had been surprisingly little affected by the Royal Commission on the Universities in 1850. It was at least partly for this reason that Foster's approach seemed so new, and that his achievement belongs properly to the wider history of university reform.
In the words of English botanist W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, "Foster stood at the parting of the ways in biological methods of teaching." But this is far from saying that he owed nothing to his predecessors or his age. To William Sharpey, his mentor at University College, and especially to ?. H. Huxley, Foster owed a great deal indeed. Besides offering general inspiration and encouragement, both interceded on his behalf to arrange posts where he could exercise his talents and both taught him to view physiology as but one branch of the broad science of biology.
What Foster may have owed to his era is obviously more difficult to specify. His life (1836-1907) coincided almost precisely with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Perhaps only in the seventeenth century has England, and especially English science, known a more vital period in its history. Whether one calls this period "the age of reform" or, in Gertrude Himmelfarb's more accurate phrase, "the age of conservative revolution," it was an age when success and influence came to depend almost as much on talent as on the social status into which one was born. Although the Anglican aristocracy remained strongly entrenched, political power was extended to other groups by the franchise bills of 1832 and 1867. Religious dissenters achieved full civil rights, and a position in government no longer required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. In 1870, when Foster went to Cambridge, the benefits of elementary education were made available to all as a result of the Elementary Education Act. Democracy and meritocracy were on the ascendant in England, even if social and economic distinctions generally remained very sharp. A generation earlier, middle-class religious dissenters such as Huxley and Foster would have found it vastly more difficult to rise to positions of national prominence and influence.
Like the Anglican leadership they served and supplied, the venerable universities at Oxford and Cambridge long resisted this democratic and reforming impulse. By the 1870's, however, Cambridge in particular was prepared to undertake substantial reform. This change of attitude was crucial not only to the success of the Cambridge School of Physiology but also to that of the even more famous Cambridge School of Physics. That these two schools paralleled each other almost exactly in their rise and development is a curiously neglected fact. It serves to emphasize that Foster's achievement at Cambridge was not entirely isolated and in fact depended on a new spirit already gaining ground there before he arrived.
Whatever light these social and institutional factors may shed on it, Foster's achievement remains mysterious until one recognizes how much it depended on his conviction that physiology belonged to the rest of biology and until one emphasizes the little known fact that he was, in the early part of his career, a competent if unprolific research physiologist. The former conviction not only informed his teaching in physiology but also allowed him to exert a tremendous influence on the more general development of the biomedical sciences at Cambridge. In 1873 he introduced a complete course in elementary biology, modeled on one that Huxley had established in 1871 at South Kensington for selected schoolmasters. Foster's version seems to have been the first such course taught in any university. Its impact on the future development of English biology and physiology was enormous. Together with Foster's strong commitment to evolutionary principles, it expressed and reinforced a broadly biological perspective then becoming rare among Continental physiologists.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology by Gerald L. Geison. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. xi
- Acknowledgments, pg. xvi
- Abbreviations, pg. xxi
- PART ONE. The Background: Foster and English Physiology, 1840–1870, pg. 1
- PART TWO. The Institutional Framework for Foster's Achievement, pg. 79
- PART THREE. The Problem of the Heartbeat and the Rise of the Cambridge School, pg. 191
- PART FOUR. Denouement and Conclusion, pg. 297
- APPENDICES, pg. 365
- Index of Authors Cited in Footnotes, pg. 385
- General Index, pg. 389