Historiography of Physiology

Abstract

In 1978, Gerald Geison opened his ambitious biography of the celebrated British physiologist, Michael Foster, declaring a peculiar lack of scholarship on the history of physiology after 1850. Forty years later, Geison’s observation resonates. While historians of science since Geison have showed some interest in physiology through 1940, most historians of physiology have continued to study the nineteenth century. How to explain this historiographical trend? What happened in the middle of the twentieth century to physiology, the nineteenth-century “queen of the natural sciences” (du Bois-Reymond quoted in Lenoir 1988)? Did physiology – as an experimental enterprise, academic discipline, set of questions, career – die out over the course of the twentieth century, such that there wasn’t much to write histories of? Did the post-WWII “molecular gaze” in the life sciences completely eclipse the physiological “molar body” (Rose, 2007), with its organic systems that had captured the minds, eyes, and hands of physiologists like Claude Bernard [1813–1878] or L.J. Henderson [1878–1942]? Did the rise of genetics in the twentieth century leave no room for physiology other than as a one-off required course for medical students? Or, did physiology persist as a scientific discipline throughout the twentieth century, somehow failing to attract the attention of most historians of twentieth-century science? Motivated by these questions and more, this historiographical essay chronicles scholarship on “the history of physiology,” a phrase that has meant, for some historians, the history of the study of “life;” for others, something akin to the history of Western medicine; and for still others, the history of experimental investigations of vertebrate organisms only after 1800. The conclusion attempts to answer the simultaneously historiographical and historical question of what happened to physiology in the twentieth century.