Sir Charles
Scott Sherrington was a British scientist known for his contributions
to physiology and neuroscience. He shared the 1932 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine with Edgar Douglas Adrian for their work
with neurons.
Sherrington
used reflexes in the spinal cord as a way of investigating the
general properties of neurons and the nervous system. These experiments
led him to postulate "Sherrington's law of reciprocal innervation,"
which states that for every neural activation of a muscle, there
is a corresponding inhibition of the opposing muscle.
Sherrington
is also known for his study of the synapse, a word which he coined
for the then-theoretical connecting point of neurons. One of Sherrington's
students, John Carew Eccles later won the Nobel Prize in 1963
for his work on the synapse. Other neuroscience research done
by Sherrington investigated proprioception and the neural control
of posture.
In
addition to the nervous system, Sherrington studied a number of
pressing medical issues of his time. In 1885 he went to Spain
to investigate an outbreak of cholera and met Santiago Ramon y
Cajal there. He also learned techniques in bacteriology from Robert
Koch while studying an outbreak of cholera in Berlin.
Sherrington
was born in London, England. He studied physiology under Sir Michael
Foster at Cambridge University. In 1887 Sherrington joined the
faculty of St Thomas's medical school. In 1895, he became a professor
at the University of Liverpool. He took over the Waynflete Professorship
in Physiology at Oxford University in 1913. He served as president
of the Royal Society from 1920 to 1925. Sherrington received the
Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire in 1922 and the Order
of Merit in 1924. Sherrington retired from Oxford in 1935, but
continued to lecture and write. He died in Eastbourne, Sussex.
Sherrington
crater was named after him by the IAU.
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