Re: Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms
I look forward to reading Sid Ochs' forthcoming book, and I congratulate Carl Zimmer on his appearance on "Fresh Air," the NPR talk show. One small point regarding du Bois-Reymond, whose biography I am writing: he did his most important work in the 1840s. An excellent summary of dBR's and Matteucci's contributions to the understanding of nerve function can be found in chapter five of Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna's magisterial Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (1987). Du Bois-Reymond was personally convinced that his work laid the doctrine of animal spirits to rest, claiming in 1848 that if he had not completely deluded [himself he had] succeeded in restoring to life, in full reality, that hundred-year-old dream of the physicist and physiologist: the identity of the nervous principle with electricity. Not everyone else responded with the same credulity. DBR's friend, Hermann Helmholtz, disputed his claim in a 1852 review, citing his own recent measurements of the nerve signal's slow speed of propagation. He summarized du Bois-Reymond's published investigations as only affording some new and insufficient grounds=94 to believe in the fulfillment of his stated promise of providing a positive, factual theory of nerve and muscle action. Outside Germany dBR met with skepticism in France and bewilderment in England. He met a few converts but did not really succeed in establishing his electrophysiological methods into a discipline until he was appointed to the chair of physiology at the University of Berlin in 1858 and began to train students on a regular basis. Perhaps this is what Sid Ochs meant. Personally, I'm delighted to see this topic discussed in this forum; I think I've bored all my colleagues to tears with it many times over by now. Gabriel Finkelstein