British Physiologist Quotes

Edgar Adrian
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
William Bayliss
John Newport Langley
Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

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

Edgar Adrian
Edgar Adrian
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
John Newport Langley
But he was also a man with great personal magnetism and considerable charm. ['The goal of this presentation', he confided to me before a 12 minute talk describing our work, 'is to impress, rather than inform.'] There were those who misjudged all of this as arrogance.

Research in neurophysiology is much more like paddling a small canoe on a mountain river. The river which is fed by many distant springs carries you along all right, though often in a peculiar direction. You have to paddle quite hard to keep afloat. And sooner or later some of your ideas are upset and are carried downstream like an upturned canoe.

Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
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...

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.

Thought is invisible nature - nature is visible thought.

If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.

A symbol, however, should be something more than a convenient and compendious expression of facts. It is, in the strictest sense, an instrument for the discovery of facts, and is of value mainly with reference to this end, by its adaptation to which it is to be judged.

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet