The history of our knowledge of the nervous and muscular mechanisms of respiration: written for the Wellcome Prize in the History of Medicine, 1932

Abstract

in considering this subject we are faced at the outset with a difficulty inasmuch as we must restrict ourselves in this essay to the nervous and muscular mechanisms of respiration and must neglect the chemical aspect with which the other two are intimately correlated. so intimate indeed is the interrelationship between the various mechanisms in the normal functioning of the body that we offer no excuse for digressing here and there to deal with topics which may appear extraneous but which nevertheless have a certain amount of bearing on our main theme. The fact so often emphasised by Sir J. Arthur Thomson that we must not confine the sciences to watertight compartments is especially true of Physiology where the relationship to the allied sciences of Chemistry, Physics, and Anatomy, is of such a degree of intimacy that the proper appreciation of a physiological topic requires a moderate, if not extensive, understanding of the relationships which the other sciences bear to it. Particularly is this true of Respiration where, in order to appreciate the nervous and muscular mechanisms, we must have some aquaintance with the respiratory gases, with the atmosphere which we breath, with the anatomy of the respiratory system and with those chemical changes which take place both in the lungs where the inspired air comes into such close contact with the circulating blood and in the tissues bathed by that blood.