128 



NA TURE 



[December 7, 1905 



an entry in the minutes of the students' scientific 

 meetings (Royal Medical Society) of 1850 states 

 that a dissertation was read by John Scott Sanderson, 

 of Newcastle, on vegetable irritability, and his first 

 publication in the Edinburgh Monthly Journal of 

 Medicine, 1851, was a criticism of the views held at 

 the time as to the metamorphosis of the coloured 

 blood corpuscles, founded on numerous experi- 

 ments and observations made by himself. After his 

 graduation in medicine he left Edinburgh and went 

 in 1851 to Paris in order to study chemical methods 

 under Wurtz. Associated with ' him were several 

 Edinburgh student friends, including Marcet and 

 Paw; he was soon attracted by the fame of Claude 

 Bernard, whose demonstrations" he attended, and by 

 whom he was introduced to Magendie. On his return 

 to England in 1853 Burdon-Sanderson married Miss 

 Herschell (whose brother subsequently became Lord 

 Chancellor), and set up in London as a practising 

 physician, being also attached to St. Mary's Hospital 

 as medical registrar. His wide knowledge and great 

 ■capacity were immediately recognised, and he was 

 made lecturer in botany and afterwards in medical 

 jurisprudence at the medical school of this hospital. 



An opportunity for the display of his powers on a 

 larger scale came in 1856, when he was appointed 

 Medical Officer of Health for Paddington. This office 

 he retained for eleven years, during the last seven 

 of which he held, in addition, the responsible position 

 of Inspector in the Medical Department of the Privy 

 Council, where he became closely associated with one 

 who became his great friend, the late Sir John Simon. 



From 1870 his work became more and more 

 identified with experimental investigation along 

 physiological lines, his aim being the more exact 

 study of the reactions of the body tissues in health 

 and in disease. Pathological inquiries were, in his 

 judgment, to be conducted in the spirit, and by the 

 experimental methods, which obtained abroad in con- 

 nection with physiology, and which he had followed 

 for two years under Claude Bernard. It is the 

 practical application of this physiological view which 

 gives his pathological work such transcendent im- 

 portance, for in the 'seventies he was the only English 

 pathologist who dealt with the subject in a way which 

 Is in accordance with modern methods. A most 

 important outcome of this endeavour to investigate 

 disease by the use of experimental and strictly 

 scientific methods was the bringing over of Dr. Klein 

 to this country. 



As assistant professor to Dr. Sharpey in University 

 College, London, from 1870 to 1874, "and still more 

 as full Jodrell professor of physiology from 1S74 to 

 1882, he exercised a profound influence upon the 

 advance of medical science. One important aspect 

 of this influence is the revolution which has been 

 ■effected in the methods of teaching physiology; this 

 was inaugurated by his organisation of class work for 

 practical physiological chemistry and for carrying 

 out simple experiments upon excitable tissues, muscle, 

 nerve, &c. Such practical work, now a conspicuous 

 feature of all academic physiological teaching, was 

 initiated by Burdon-Sanderson, who insisted on its 

 importance, not merely for its obvious educational 

 utility in implanting a knowledge of fact and method, 

 hut still more for its value as a means of cultivating 

 powers of observation and inference. 



In 1882 he acceded to an urgent request that he 

 should come to Oxford as the first Waynflete pro- 

 fessor of physiology. He decided on this course 

 because he believed that it was for the highest 

 interests of medical education, the medical profes- 



NO. 1884, VOL. J?,'] 



sion, and the public, that the University of Oxford 

 should regain the great position which she once held 

 in regard to medicine. As professor of physiology for 

 twelve years, and then as Regius professor of 

 medicine for nine years, he laboured consistently for 

 this end, and, as his life drew to its close, he had the 

 supreme satisfaction of realising that the end had been 

 practically attained. Departments of human 

 anatomy, physiology, and' pathology, efficiently 

 equipped and under competent professors, form the 

 material witness of this achievement, but the students 

 who have passed through the scientific medical course 

 at Oxford furnish still more cogent evidence of the 

 great resuscitation which he has brought about; for 

 Oxford this is his enduring monument. 



Sir John Burdon-Sanderson was so distinguished 

 as a scientific man, and conducted important investi- 

 gations in so many branches of medical science, 

 that it is possible in the space of this memoir to 

 make only a brief reference to the most conspicuous 

 of his researches. As regards the whole of his 

 physiological and pathological work, extending over 

 a period of nearly fifty years, certain features stand 

 out prominently. His adoption throughout of experi- 

 ment as the only fruitful method; his belief that " no 

 real advance could be made until it became possible 

 to investigate the phenomena by methods approach- 

 ing more or less closely to those of the physicist in 

 exactitude"; his constant anxiety that attention 

 should be focused upon the processes which are 

 observed in living tissues, whether normally present 

 in health or modified in disease ; and finally his 

 conviction that all such processes, observed either in 

 isolated tissues or in particular organs of the body, 

 are to be regarded as exhibited because they are 

 inexorably linked with the interests of the whole 

 organism of which the particular structures form a 

 part — natural selection in its widest sense. 



In practical medicine his desire for exactitude led 

 him to invent the stethograph for obtaining mensur- 

 able records of the respiratory movements of ma... 

 and to modify Marey's sphygmograph in order to 

 obtain such records of the arterial blood pressure. 



In pathology he employed similar exact methods 

 for the investigation of the inflammatory process 

 and of infective diseases, particularly tuberculosis, 

 pvasmia, and septicaemia. His reports to the Privy 

 Council, and his other publications on these subjects, 

 reveal conceptions as to the character of the processes 

 involved in disease, and of the nature of the response 

 of the normal tissues to infective introduction, which 

 are still far ahead of the general knowledge of the 

 present dav, and are viewed from the standpoint, in 

 all essentials, of the modern pathologist. A remark- 

 able instance of this is furnished by his early work 

 on immunity, a subject which, in its recent develop- 

 ment, has acquired an importance for the health of 

 the community which it would be difficult to over- 

 estimate. Thus, three years before Pasteur published 

 his celebrated work on the subject, Burdon-Sanderson 

 showed that anthrax virus could be attenuated by 

 its transmission through the bodies of rodents, and 

 suggested that it might be possible, by using the 

 attenuated virus, to confer protection against the 

 disease. 



In physiology he carried out from 1871 to 187S 

 experimental inquiries upon the mechanism of circula- 

 tion and of respiration, made an extensive investiga- 

 tion as to asphyxia, and was the first to show that 

 the nerve fibres in the corona radiata of the cerebral 

 hemispheres would, when locally excited, give rise 

 to definite bodv movements. But his main work dealt 



