1857–1952 · physiologist, Liverpool and Oxford

he English physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington worked at Liverpool and from 1913 at Oxford. He shared the 1932 Nobel Prize with Edgar Adrian for work on the functions of neurons.

what he did

Writing a section of Michael Foster's textbook in 1897, he needed a word for the junction between two nerve cells and chose synapse. His Silliman lectures at Yale, published as The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Sherrington, C. S., 1906), built the study of the reflex into a theory of how a nervous system makes one animal out of many parts: the final common path, reciprocal inhibition of opposing muscles, the summing of excitation and inhibition at each junction. See the archive page.

what is argued about

Whether behaviour is built from reflexes at all, or from rhythms the spinal cord generates by itself; and for decades whether the synapse works by electricity or by chemistry. Loewi's frog heart made the case for chemistry; the electrical synapse returned later (Furshpan & Potter, 1959).

why he is here

The threshold unit of 1943, which sums excitation and inhibition and fires or does not, is Sherrington's synapse rewritten as logic: see Walter Pitts.

in the tour: the room called "The gap" has a placard called "A word for a gap" ···

Primary works and sources

1. Sherrington, C. S. (1906). The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; New Haven: Yale University Press. The Silliman lectures of 1904. Public domain. archive.org/details/integrativeactio00sher
2. Loewi (1921). Über humorale Übertragbarkeit der Herznervenwirkung. Pflügers Archiv für die Gesamte Physiologie des Menschen und der Tiere. doi:10.1007/bf01738910
3. Furshpan & Potter (1959). Transmission at the giant motor synapses of the crayfish. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1959.sp006143

see also

	archive: The Integrative Action
	Santiago Ramón y Cajal
	archive: the squid — what travels along the fibre