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VOICES FROM THE PAST |
Theodore M. Brown is with the Departments of History and of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. Elizabeth Fee is with the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Theodore M. Brown, PhD, Dept. of History, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 (e-mail: theodore_brown{at}urmc.rochester.edu).
ONE OF AMERICA’S LEADING physiologists and most respected scientific statesmen of the 20th century, Walter Bradford Cannon was born on October 19, 1871, in Prairie du Chien, Wis, the son of Colbert Hanchett Cannon, a railroad official, and Sarah Wilma Denio, a high school teacher. He attended primary and secondary school in Wisconsin and Minnesota before entering Harvard College in 1892. At Harvard, Cannon was attracted to the biological sciences and to psychology and philosophy.1 He graduated summa cum laude in 1896 and entered Harvard Medical School.
In medical school, Cannon sought out opportunities for research. The professor of physiology, Henry P. Bowditch, put him to work using x-rays, discovered less than a year before, to explore the mechanism of swallowing. Cannon and his coworker devised techniques for visualizing the movement of digestive organs, and thus he began his investigation of the physiology of digestion, a topic that occupied him for the next decade and a half and launched his career as a physiologist. When Cannon graduated from medical school in 1900, he was appointed instructor in physiology. In 1906, he succeeded Bowditch as George Higginson Professor of Physiology and chair of the Harvard Department of Physiology.
Cannon was early attracted to problems in the physiology of emotion. In 1897, he noticed that when his experimental animals were frightened or in some other way disturbed, peristaltic waves in the stomach sometimes ceased abruptly. After publishing his synthetic The Mechanical Factors of Digestion in 1911, Cannon turned his attention to a broadly conceived investigation of the physiology of the emotions, thus becoming the first major investigator to work systematically on this topic.2
Cannon collected evidence to show that when an animal is strongly aroused, the sympathetic division of its autonomic nervous system combines with the hormone adrenaline to mobilize the animal for an emergency response of "flight or fight." The "sympathico-adrenal system" orchestrates changes in blood supply, sugar availability, and the blood’s clotting capacity in a marshaling of resources keyed to the "violent display of energy." He summarized his initial findings in his path-breaking 1915 book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.3
In 1917 and 1918, Cannon turned his physiological expertise to wartime service. At various laboratories and field hospitals in England and France, he worked as "laboratory hermit" and "field investigator" on the problems of wound shock, studying its complex chain of phenomena.4 He and his colleagues first focused on blood acidosis but soon realized that this was a secondary consequence of a primary impairment: "an inadequate supply of oxygen to tissues because of deficient circulation of the blood. . . . due to a reduced volume of blood in the circulatory system."4 Emergency treatment then focused on the prompt replacement of fluid lost from the blood stream.
After the war, Cannon returned to his earlier studies, pursuing several fruitful lines of investigation over the next 2 decades. His most important work concentrated on the complexities of chemical neurotransmission (for which Otto Loewi received a Nobel Prize in 1936) and on "homeostasis" (a term coined by Cannon in 1926), the maintenance of steady states in the body and the physiological processes through which they are regulated. Beginning in 1928, Cannon turned increasing attention to the clinical implications of his physiological discoveries, thus becoming a major authority in the emerging research field of psychosomatic medicine.5
At this point in his career, Cannon also became a major public and political figure. He had earlier been involved in defending animal experimentation in medical research against the attacks of antivivisectionists, and he now emerged as a strong defender of the scientific community against the assault of fascist governments.6 He became a national leader of such organizations as the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy and, a few years later, the American– Soviet Medical Society. Cannon was neither naive nor an apologist for the Communist Party, but an extraordinarily open-minded man who spoke out on the causes of his day with the courage of his convictions.
Cannon died in Franklin, NH, in 1945 as a beloved and much-honored investigator, teacher, mentor, and public role model. He was several times considered "prize-worthy" by the Nobel committee but never received that honor. Yet one of his admirers, Ralph W. Gerard, said in 1972 that despite being, in his view, unfairly overlooked, Cannon was nonetheless "the greatest American physiologist."7 He was, indeed, "a rather immortal hero."
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1. Benison S, Barger AC. Walter Bradford Cannon. In: Gillispie CC, ed. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol 15. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1978:71–77.
2. Fleming D. Walter Bradford Cannon. In: James WT, ed. Dictionary of American Biography. Supplement 3. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1973:133–137.
3. Cannon WB. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. New York, NY: D. Appleton & Company; 1915.
4. Cannon WB. The Way of an Investigator: A Scientist’s Experiences in Medical Research. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 1945:130–145.
5. Cannon WB. The role of emotions in disease. Ann Intern Med. 1936;9:1453–1465.
6. Lederer SE. Walter Bradford Cannon. In: Garraty JA, Carnes MC, eds. American National Biography. Vol 4. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 1999:338–340.
7. Gerard RW. Is the age of heroes ended? In: Brooks CM, Koizumi K, Pinkston JO, eds. The Life and Contributions of Walter Bradford Cannon 1871–1945. New York, NY: Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn; 1975:197–208.
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