19th-century Physiologist Quotes

Ivan Pavlov

Wilhelm Wundt

Hermann von Helmholtz

Claude Bernard

Charles Richet

Charles Scott Sherrington

Archibald Hill

Nothing indicates, however, at present that the artificial production of living matter is beyond the possibilities of science...

The man of science who is not a doubter has no claim to honorable standing. He who doubts not is dead to science.

Frederic Schiller Lee

Thought is invisible nature - nature is visible thought.

John Scott Haldane

When we know that we don't know, that is itself an achievement, for then the field is cleared of the confusing and obstructing rubbish of tradition, and we are free to use all our ingenuity and imagination in contriving methods to find out.

Anton Julius Carlson

If a pair of electrodes (zinc covered by chamois leather and moistened with brine) are strapped to the front and back of the chest, and connected with a Lippmann's capillary electrometer, the mercury in the latter will be seen to move slightly but sharply at each beat of the heart.... The electrical variation precedes the heart's beat.

Augustus Desiré Waller

Statistics manufacture certainty out of random events, just as they ensure the profits of Monte Carlo, provided the roulette wheels run truly.

Karl Gotthelf Lehmann

A recognized fact which goes back to the earliest times is that every living organism is not the sum of a multitude of unitary processes, but is, by virtue of interrelationships and of higher and lower levels of control, an unbroken unity.

Walter Rudolf Hess

A number of tests were made for the purpose of discovering whether the pressure of oxygen in the blood was or was not higher than that in the alveolar air. In all cases they were so nearly the same that we attribute the passage of gas through the pulmonary epithelium to diffusion.

Joseph Barcroft

Without hypothesis there can be no progress in knowledge.

I think that the more thoroughly and conscientiously we endeavor to study biological problems, the more we are convinced that even those processes which we have already regarded as explicable by chemical and physical laws are in reality infinitely more complex, and at present defy any attempt at a mechanical explanation.

Gustav von Bunge

To say that a physician or surgeon ignorant of Anatomy is like a man professing to mend watches without ever having opened one, or like a traveler wandering through an unknown country...

William Brinton

Phylaxis, a word seldom used, stands in the Greek for protection. Anaphylaxis will thus stand for the opposite. Anaphylaxis, from its Greek etymological source, therefore means that state of an organism in which it is rendered hypersensitive, instead of being protected.

Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.

We have in the spinal cord the antetype (Vorbild) and the foundation for the entire structure of the brain.

Friedrich Arnold

Those who have occasion to enter into the depths of what is oddly, if generously, called the literature of a scientific subject, alone know the difficulty of emerging with an unsoured disposition.

John Newport Langley

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

More than one way for doing the same thing is provided by the natural constitution of the nervous system. This luxury of means of compassing a given combination seems to offer the means of restitution of an act after its impairment or loss in one of its several forms.

Charles Scott Sherrington

Observation is simple, indefatigable, industrious, upright, without any preconceived opinion. Experiment is artificial, impatient, busy, digressive, passionate, unreliable.

Johannes Peter Müller

But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better to hold a well-understood and intelligible opinion, even if it should turn out to be wrong, than to be content with a muddle-headed mixture of conflicting views, sometimes miscalled impartiality, and often no better than no opinion at all.

William Bayliss

A vital phenomenon can only be regarded as explained if it has been proven that it appears as the result of the material components of living organisms interacting according to the laws which those same components follow in their interactions outside of living systems.

Adolf Eugen Fick

The elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells in an analogous, though very diversified manner, so that it may be asserted, that there is one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of organisms, however different, and that this principle is the formation of cells.

Theodor Schwann

Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.

Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke

All psychical acts without exception, if they are not complicated by elements of emotion... develop by way of reflex. Hence, all conscious movements resulting from these acts and usually described as voluntary, are reflex movements in the strict sense of the term.

It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread — the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.

An induction shock results in a contraction or fails to do so according to its strength; if it does so at all, it produces in the muscle at that time the maximal contraction that can result from stimuli of any strength.

Henry Pickering Bowditch