100 YEARS AGO

Dr. Brunton is never content with a mere induction from experience when it is possible to suggest a rational explanation.

“I was once demonstrating the action of ammonia before a class here many years ago, and showed that if you held either ammonia or chloroform before the nose of a rabbit the heart stopped instantaneously. ⃛ After the lecture was over, a student came up to me and said: ‘If ammonia held before the nose stops the heart, how is it that it is of use in fainting? It ought to be exceedingly bad in fainting, and yet everybody knows it is good.’ Well, I simply did not know. I said: ‘I think it may possibly be that it tends at the same time to cause a deep inspiration, and thus stimulates the heart indirectly.’ But I was not satisfied with this explanation, and so I put the question to the test of experiment. I found the answer to be this: At the same time that you stop the heart through the vagus by ammonia or any other irritating volatile substance held before the nose, you stimulate reflexly the vasomotor centre, cause contraction of the arterioles, and raise the blood-pressure enormously.”

From Nature 11 November 1897.

50 YEARS AGO

Founder of modern British epidemiology, Charles Creighton ⃛ was the most learned British medical scholar of the nineteenth century, who stood for something fundamental in the intellectual world of his generation. He was handicapped, however, by a curious mental obliquity which forced him to believe that the generally accepted must be necessarily false. Incapable of sharing much of the current medical teaching and frequently clashing with his medical colleagues, he brought matters to a head when in his article on vaccination in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” he declared that cowpox had nothing to do with smallpox, affording no protection against it. This was acclaimed by the antivaccinators, and Creighton was ostracized by the medical profession. He spent his last years in philosophical isolation in a tumble-down cottage at Upper Boddington, turning to Shakespeare for solace.

From Nature 15 November 1947.