Henry Pickering Bowditch

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Pickering Bowditch

Henry Pickering Bowditch (born April 4, 1840 in Boston , † March 13, 1911 there ) was an American physiologist .

youth

Bowditch was the son of Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch, a Boston merchant, and Lucy Orne Nichols. His paternal grandfather was the self-taught mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch , the author of the book New American Practical Navigator (1802) and the translator of Laplace's Mécanique céleste . His brother Charles Pickering Bowditch was a businessman and an archaeologist.

Bowditch grew up in Boston and grew up in the new family home in West Roxbury, on the outskirts of Boston. He attended Epes S. Dixwell's prep school with classmate Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He went to Harvard College in September 1857 and graduated in 1861. Because he wanted to study medicine, he attended Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge and began his studies in natural history and chemistry. But then the American Civil War got in the way.

In the civil war

Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University 1866

In November 1861 he was named 2nd Lieutenant of the First Massachusetts Cavalry and in January 1862 they were transferred to the front lines. He took part in the Battle of Secessionsville and his regiment was in Reverse in Fredericksburg. In June he was made First Lieutenant and in May 1863 Captain. Then he was in the battles of Adie, Culpepper and Rapidan Station and New Hope Church, where he was shot in the right forearm on November 27, 1863. During the winter of 1863/64 he was on vacation and in February 1864 he was honorably discharged, but immediately entered the Fifth Massachusetts Calvary Regiment, which consisted of African Americans, as a major and entered Richmond with them on April 3, 1865, where he then left the army.

In the fall of 1865 he resumed his studies at the Lawrence Scientific School, where he studied under Professor Jeffries Wyman . Although he entered Harvard Medical School in the fall of 1865, he continued his studies in comparative anatomy under Wyman during the semester break. In 1866 he received his AM degree and in 1868 he graduated from the Medical School. He studied with Charles Sanders Peirce (Bowditch graduated in 1861, Peirce in 1859).

In Europe

In the late summer of 1868 Bowditch went to Europe. He first spent a year in Paris. Although one knows from his notebooks (which are in the Harvard Medical Archives), many of his entries refer to hospital doctors Jean-Martin Charcot , Paul Broca and Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and his intention to combine medical practice with scientific research. His later letters give a clear indication that he was drawn to the purely scientific aspect of the profession. These were written while studying with Claude Bernard and Louis-Antoine Ranvier , devoting three days a week to physiology and the remaining three to microscopy. He attended lectures by other scientists, such as B. Étienne-Jules Marey , on the physics of flight, Louis Denis Jules Gavarret (1809–1890) on the physiology of muscle movement, Paul Bert on the nature of sound and the physiology of its perception, and Edmé Félix Alfred Vulpian on the chemistry of blood. But his judgment on Parisian medical science was negative: "French physiology has no system."

At the suggestion of the German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne , Bowditch traveled to Germany. First he studied microscopic anatomy in Bonn in May 1869 with Max Schultze and Eduard Rindfleisch , and then, in September 1869, for two years with Carl Ludwig in Leipzig. Bowditch met a new generation of experimental physiologists: Thomas Lauder Brunton (1844–1916) from Scotland, Ray Lankester from England, Angelo Mosso from Italy, Hugo Kronecker from Germany and C. Ustimovitsch from Russia.

Bowditch was Professor of Physiology at Harvard University from 1876 to 1906 . From 1903 he was the first holder of the George Higginson professorship of physiology . He was succeeded by Walter Cannon . In 1872 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1887 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1904 to the American Philosophical Society .

family

On September 9, 1871, five days before his return to America, he married Selma Knauth, the daughter of Franz Theodor and Elisabeth Knauth, German bankers from Leipzig. That made Bowditch the lawyer Antonio Knauth's brother-in-law .

Fonts (selection)

  • About the interference of the retarding and accelerating heart nerves. In: Works from the Physiological Institute in Leipzig. 1972, pp. 259-280.
  • On the peculiarities of irritability exhibited by the muscle fibers of the heart. In: Reports on the negotiations of the Royal Saxon Society of Sciences in Leipzig: Mathematical-Physical Class. 23, 1871, pp. 652-689, and translated by J. Schaefer, W. Deppert, RK Lie, B. Lohff and MIM Noble: On the pecularities of excitability which the fibers of cardiac muscle show. In: The Interval-Force Relationship of the Heart. Bowditch Revisited. Cambridge University Press, 1992. (2nd edition. 2011)
  • On the proof of the indefatigability of the mammalian nerves. In: Archives for Physiology. 1890, pp. 505-508.
  • with Granville Stanley Hall: Optical Illusions of Motions. In: Journal of Physiology. 3, 1882, pp. 297-307.
  • Henry Pickering Bowditch Publications in Internet Archives

literature

  • WB Cannon: Biographical Memoir Henry Pickering 1840-1911. (PDF; 1.45 MB). (= Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. XVII, Eighth Memoir). Washington DC 1922.
  • Arnold M. Katz: Henry Pickering Bowditch and the founding of American physiology. In: Dialogues in Cardiovascular Medicine. 8 (2), 2003, pp. 98-100.
  • Jochen Schaefer, Wolfgang Deppert , Reidar Lie et al.: Historical note on the translation of HP Bowditch's paper 'On the peculiarities of irritability which the muscle fibers of the heart show'. In: M. Noble, Th. Seed (Ed.): The Interval Force Relationship of the Heart. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, pp. 31-39.
  • John R. Brobeck, Orr E. Reynolds, Toby A. Appel (Eds.): History of the American Physiological Society: The First Century, 1887-1987. Springer-Verlag, New York 1987, ISBN 1-4614-7576-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Epes S. Dixwell dead. In: Cambridge Tribune. Volume XXII, Number 41, December 9, 1899.
  2. ^ Henry Pickering Bowditch Photo in uniform at the Massachusetts Historical Society
  3. ↑ LAWRENCE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL, established at Harvard University in 1847 by a gift of $ 50,000 from industrialist Abbott Lawrence, who wished to support applied science in eastern Massachusetts
  4. ^ Member History: Henry P. Bowditch. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 15, 2018 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bowditch, Henry Pickering
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1840
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1911
Place of death Boston