Abstract
In studying the history of any scientific discipline in the United States, it is hard to escape some version of the following questions: At what point did American scientists achieve full parity with their disciplinary colleagues across the Atlantic? When did American representatives of this or that discipline no longer feel the need to go abroad in search of proper facilities, training, and intellectual guidance? When did they begin to produce a substantial body of research that attracted international attention and esteem? When did they come to be recognized as equal participants and even leaders at the research front? When, in short, did they cease to be “scientific colonials?”
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Notes
On Walter B. Cannon, see his splendid autobiography, The Way of an Investigator: A Scientist’s Experiences in Medical Research (New York: Norton, 1945); Donald Fleming, “Walter B. Cannon and Homeostasis,” Soc. Res. 51 (1984): 609–640; Saul Benison, A. Clifford Barger, and Elin L. Wolfe, “Changing of the Guard,” Harv. Med. Alum. Bull. 56 (1982): 34–41; and Benison and Barger, “Walter Bradford Cannon,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XV, suppl. 1, ed. C. C. Gillispie (New York: Scribner, 1970) 71–77. (Hereafter, DSB.)
See Robert G. Frank, Jr., “American Physiologists in German Laboratories, 1850–1914,” chapter I in this book, pp. 11–46. esp. 19–23.
See Gerald L. Geison, “Keith Lucas,” DSB, VIII, 532–535.
See Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler,2 vols. (Oxford, 1925), vol. 2, 413–414, esp. n. 1.
Frederic Schiller Lee to Prof. [Edward] Ellery, Union College, 30 November 1915, Lee Papers, f. El. The Lee Papers are deposited at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, Health Sciences Library, Special Collections, New York City. ( Here-after, Lee Papers.) This collection was not yet fully organized and catalogued when I examined it in the Spring of 1984.
Cannon, “A Parenthesis of War,” in Way of An Investigator,pp. 130–145. On fatigue, see Richard Gillespie, “Industrial Fatigue and the Discipline of Physiology,” chapter X in this book, pp. 237–262, esp. 244–249. On the American Physiological Society (APS) and World War I, see William H. Howell and Charles W. Greene, History of the American Physiological Society Semicentennial, 1887–1937 (Baltimore, MD: APS, 1938), pp. 103–108. For other comments on physiology and World War I, see the autobiographical essays gathered together as The Excitement and Fascination of Science (Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1965), passim, including pp. 87, 103, 255, 288, 367, 375, 558, 563.
D. R. Hooker to APS Council, 6 December 1918, Council Minutes, APS vol. 2 (1915–1923), p. 65a, American Physiological Society Archives, Bethesda, MD. (Hereafter, APS Council Minutes. )
I have reproduced Tables 1 and 2 as they are conveniently found in Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study ( Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971 ), pp. 188–189.
John F. Fulton and Leonard G. Wilson, eds., Selected Readings in the History of Physiology, 2d ed. ( Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1966 ).
On Fulton, see A. Earl Walker, “John Farquhar Fulton,” DSB, V, 207–209.
Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), esp. p. 341.
Lee to Ellery, 30 November 1915, Lee Papers, f. El.
During a visit to England in 1923, Herbert Gasser of Washington University even complained that “There are also too many Americans [here].” Gasser to Joseph Erlanger, 3 October 1923, Erlanger Papers, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Special Collections, Box 2, f. 27. (Hereafter, Erlanger Papers.) For a superb introduction to and description of this collection, see Frank, “The Joseph Erlanger Collection at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis,” J. Hist. Biol. 12 (1979): 193–201. For more on American neurophysiologists in English laboratories after World War I, see Louise Marshall, “Instruments, Techniques, and Social Units in American Neurophysiology, 1870–1940,” chapter XV in this book, pp. 351–369, esp. 351–353. For autobiographical accounts by other American physiologists who visited English laboratories, see Excitement and Fascination of Science.
On Erlanger at Washington University, see Frank, “Joseph Erlanger Collection;” and Louise Marshall, “The Fecundity of Aggregates: The Axonologists at Washington University, 19221942,” Perspect. Biol. Med. 26 (1983): 613–636.
Lee to Erlanger, 9 June 1915, Lee Papers, f. Erlanger. Lee asked Erlanger for his blueprints and total floor space because “the time has come for us here at Columbia to formulate plans for a new physiological laboratory—plans which may, however, never be realized.” He did not elaborate.
See Erlanger to Lee, 12 June 1915, Lee Papers, f. Erlanger. Erlanger added that of the total floor space of 22,724 sq. ft., “the department of Pharmacology has the privilege of using about 3,000 sq. ft.” In the same box in the Lee Papers is a loose unsigned drawing labeled “Floor space, department of physiology, January, 1914,” indicating a total floor space of 8,047 sq. ft. This drawing presumably depicts Lee’s laboratory at Columbia.
Gasser to Erlanger, 3 October 1923, Erlanger Papers.
Naciso San Louis Cordero to Erlanger, 30 October 1927, Erlanger Papers, f. 10; and Erlanger to Cordero, 26 November 1927, Erlanger Papers, f. 14. For more on Cordero, who was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, see Clifford W. Wells to Erlanger, 17 August 1925, Erlanger Papers, f. 10.
On the Harvard Laboratories of Physiology as of 1920, including floor plans, see Alejandra Laszlo, “Physiology of the Future: Institutional Styles at Columbia and Harvard,” chapt. III in this book, pp. 67–96, on 85–88.
Anton J. Carlson, “University of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences, Department of Physiology,” in Methods and Problems of Medical Education,19th ser. (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, Division of Medical Education, 1931), pp. 37–41, esp. 39. For a more complete description of the Hull Biological Laboratories that this new building replaced, see The Annual Register for the Year Ending June 30, 1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1925), p. 38. My thanks to George Anastoplo for this reference. I have converted the exterior dimensions of the buildings into square feet and divided the space among the departments as indicated in the sources just cited.
Robert Gesell, “Department of Physiology, University of Michigan,” in Methods and Problems of Medical Education18th ser. (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1930), pp. 1–16; and Horace W. Davenport Fifty Years of Medicine at the University of Michigan 1891–1941 (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Medical School, 1987), chapt. 6. My thanks to Dr. Davenport for allowing me to see and cite this chapter of his manuscript.
W. J. Meek, “The Beginnings of American Physiology,” Ann. Med. Hist. 10 (1928): 111–125, esp. 124.
On Physiological Reviewssee APS Council Minutes, vol. 2, pp. 80–81,109a-109g, and vol. 6 (1936), passim; Howell and Greene History of APSpp. 108–109; and Toby A. Appel, “The Second Quarter Century,” in J. R. Brobeck, O. E. Reynolds, and T. A. Appel, eds. History of the American Physiological Society: The First Century (Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society, 1987).
Howell, “Address of Welcome…,” 19 August 1929, in Howell and Greene, History of APS,pp. 138–140, quote on 138.
R. W. Gerard, Mirror to Physiology: A Self-Survey of Physiological Science ( Washington, DC: American Physiological Society, 1958 ), p. 140.
The word “elite” can arouse surprising passion among historians of American science. I use the word here in what I take to be a commonsensical way, perhaps roughly equivalent to Daniel J. Kevles’s “best-science elitism.” On the tension between American democratic ideals and “best-science elitism,” see Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978). A closely related issue is the alleged indifference of Americans to basic research, an allegation that Nathan Reingold has repeatedly challenged in recent years. For convenient access to the pertinent literature, see Albert E. Moyer, “History of Physics,” in Historical Writing on American Science,ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter Osiris,2d ser., 1 (1985): 163–182, esp. 173–176, n. 20–22.
Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science ( New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963 ), pp. 33–61.
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., esp. pp. 46–49.
For a plea that visual language be used more often by historians of science, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760–1840,” Hist. Sci. 14 (1976): 149–195.
As noted in the preface to this book, I am indebted to a series of talented part-time research assistants for the data on which much of the following discussion is based. For a somewhat similar body of data for three other disciplines in the United States, see Kevles, “The Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative Analysis,” in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979), pp. 139–172, esp. 161–172. See also Arnold Thackray, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, P. Thomas Carroll, and Robert F. Bud, Chemistry in America, 1876–1976: Historical Indicators ( Boston, MA: Reidel, 1985 ).
See APS Council Minutes, vol. 1, pp. 166–170 on the founding of the American Journal of Physiology with copy of printed agreement between Porter and the Society; and vol. 2, pp. 382–385 on the Society’s assuming direct ownership of the journal. More generally, see the sources in n. 33.
On the editorial policies and practices of the American Journal of Physiologysee Howell and Greene History of APSpp. 78–83, 97–98; and Appel’s chapters on the first seventy-five years of the APS in History of the American Physiological Society.
On “biological” and “general” physiology respectively, see Jane Maienschein, “Physiology, Biology, and the Advent of Physiological Morphology,” chapt. VII, this book, pp. 177–193; and Philip J. Pauly, “General Physiology and the Discipline of Physiology, 1890–1935,” chapt. VIII, this book, pp. 195–207.
Am. J. Physiol. 106 (1 November 1933, no. 2), p. 250 (inside cover), quote from item 2.
E. F. Adolph et al., “Physiology in North America, 1945: Survey by a Committee of the American Physiological Society,” Proc. Fed. Soc. Exp. Biol. 5 (1946): 407–436.
Ibid., p. 422.
Ibid., p. 420; the committee even included genetics among these presumed subdisciplines of physiology.
Gerard, Mirror,p. 32. This expansive estimate included, e.g., plant and bacterial physiologists, many of whom might well have named botany as their discipline if forced to choose.
The total number of individual authors for each of the thirty-volume units from volumes 1120 (1898–1937) was as follows: volumes 1–30, 552; volumes 31–60, 836; volumes 61–90, 1,990; volumes 91–120, 2,633.
The estimate of 3,600 total individual contributors begins with the data in n. 40. Using Price’s estimate (Little Science, pp. 87–90) that 40 percent of new authors will produce a second paper or more, one can calculate that volumes 90–120 had 1,935 new authors, while 1,750 authors dropped out before volume 90 appeared. Thus, the total number of individual authors would be 1,935 + 1,750 = 3,685, or, roughly speaking, 3, 600.
For data on APS membership, see Joseph F. Saunders and Aubrey E. Taylor, “Membership,” in The First Century.
Put another way, annual research productivity varied quite widely within the highly productive group listed in Table 5. Among the more extreme examples of the actual range are Yandell Henderson, with an average annual publication rate of less than 1.5 articles, and Arturo Rosenbleuth, who published more than 7 articles per year on average.
On the time-consuming task of securing and maintaining appropriate laboratory materials and animals, see Adele E. Clarke, “Research Materials and Reproductive Science in the United States, 1910–1940,” chapt. XIV, this book, pp. 323–350.
Wallace O. Fenn, History of the American Physiological Society: The Third Quarter Century, 19371962 (Washington, DC: American Physiological Society, 1963), p. 12, mentions Hooker’s “very firm” attitude that “Papers were not to be given serial numbers with general titles for the whole series and separate subtitles for each paper.” See also item 2g of the “Publication Policy of the American Journal of Physiology,” dated 15 June 1930, printed and distributed with the suggestion that it “be framed and hung in your laboratory so that every worker may have access to it at all times.” According to item 2g, special scrutiny would be given to “Papers which appear to be of the nature of progress reports the publication of which might be properly withheld until the research has progressed to The completion of at least a significant phase of the general problem.” A printed copy of this policy statement is deposited in the APS Archives, Bethesda.
See Frank, “American Physiologists,” pp. 35–36.
See Marshall, “Instruments, Techniques, and Social Units,” this volume, pp. 360–361.
See Fenn, History of the APS, 1937–1962,p. 6: “Dr. Ivy is reported to have published 1,500 scientific articles,… which is something of a record.” Perhaps Ivy does indeed hold the record; the most prolific author found by Price in his quantitative studies of science was the nineteenth-century British mathematician Arthur Cayley, who produced a mere 995 papers. Price, Little Science,p. 49.
Gerard, “The Organization of Science,” in Excitement and Fascination of Science,pp. 149–160, on 155, n. 1. More generally on the practice of multiple authorship in twentieth-century science, see Price, Little Science,pp. 87–90.
Price, Little Science,pp. 40–41. Price elsewhere suggests that frequency of citation might be a better index of quality than frequency of publication. Ibid., pp. 77f.
For basic biographical information on the men in Table 5, see their entries in American Men of Science.
Howell still awaits a full-scale study. In the meantime, see Anne Clark Rodman, “William Henry Howell,” DSB, VI, 525–527; and especially Erlanger’s account in Biogr. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. 26 (1951): 153–180.
On E. V. McCollum, see Stanley L. Becker, “Elmer Verner McCollum,” DSB, VIII, 590591; and McCollum, From Kansas Farm Boy to Scientist (Lawrence, KS: Univ. of Kansas, 1964). On George W. Corner, see his delightful autobiography, Corner, Seven Ages of a Medical Scientist: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). On H. M. Evans, see E. C. Amoroso and Corner, “Herbert McLean Evans, 1882–1971,” Biogr. Mem. Fell. R. Soc. Lond. 18, (1972): 83–186; Corner, “Herbert McLean Evans,” Biogr. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. 45 (1974): 153–192; and I. D. Raacke, “The Appointment of Herbert McLean Evans as Head of Anatomy at Berkeley,” J. Hist. Biol. 9 (1976): 301–322. On Gregory Pincus, see Dwight J. Ingle, “Gregory Pincus,” Biogr. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci., 42 (1969): 229–270; M. C. Chang, “Gregory Goodwin Pincus,” DSB, X, 610–611; and James Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press 1984 ), pp. 317–333.
On L. J. Henderson, see Cannon, “Lawrence Joseph Henderson, 1878–1942,” Biogr. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. 23 (1943): 52–58; John Parascandola, “Lawrence Joseph Henderson,” DSB, VI, 260–262; Parascandola, Lawrence J. Henderson and the Concept of Organized Systems (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1968); Parascandola, “Organismic and Holistic Concepts in the Thought of L. J. Henderson,” J. Hist. Biol. 4 (1971): 63–113; and Stephen J. Cross and William R. Albury, “Walter B. Cannon, L. J. Henderson, and the Organic Analogy” (forthcoming in Osiris, 2d ser., vol. 3). On Loeb, see Donald Fleming, “Introduction,” in Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life, reprint ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964 ), vii-xli; Fleming, `Jacques Loeb,“ DSB, VIII, 445–447; and especially Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb, Experimental Biology, and the Engineering Ideal ( New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987 ).
On J. J. R. Macleod, see Lloyd G. Stevenson, “John James Rickard Macleod,” DSB, VIII, 614–615. For an excellent account of the Toronto discovery, see Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin (Toronto; University of Chicago Press, 1982), which gives extensive biographical attention to the other three main participants, Frederick G. Banting, Charles H. Best, and J. B. Collip. On Banting, see also Lloyd G. Stevenson, “Frederick Grant Banting,” DSB, I, 440443; and Bliss, Banting: A Biography (Toronto: University of Chicago Press, 1984). On J. B. Collip, see also R. L. Noble, `James Bertram Collip,“ DSB, III, 351–354, C. H. Best, thus far the most neglected of the quartet, was an active member of the American Physiological Society (including its Council) and published twenty-one papers in the American Journal of Physiology before 1940. During the same period, Collip published twenty-four papers in the journal, while Banting published but nine.
The nineteen APS Presidents in Table 5 are indicated in italic print. Biographical sketches of all nineteen can be found in Howell and Greene, History of APS; and Fenn, History of APS, 1937–1962.
See Appel, “Second Quarter Century,” chapt. 3.
The historical relationship of Washington University to both St. Louis Medical College and the rival Missouri Medical College is complex and deserves further study. Among other things, the latter two institutional names continued to be used in some contexts even after both schools were officially merged with Washington University in the 1890s. A first step toward sorting out these relationships is the pamphlet, “Special Collections,” Library of the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, esp. pp. 20–23.
Laszlo, “Physiology of the Future,” pp. 70–78.
I owe these numbers to Toby Appel, historian/archivist at the American Physiological Society, who pulled them from the APS computer databases.
See Carlson, “University of Chicago,” p. 38.
On physiological chemistry at Yale, see Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 289–295. On similar inbreeding at the University of Michigan see Davenport, Fifty Years,chapt. 6.
Carlson has been woefully neglected by biographers and historians of physiology. For basic information, see Lester R. Dragstedt, “Anton Julius Carlson,” Biogr. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. 35 (1961): 1–12; Maurice B. Visscher, “Anton Julius Carlson,” DSB, III, 68–70; and Ingle, “Anton J. Carlson: A Biographical Sketch,” Perspect. Biol. Med. 22 (1979): S114–5136.
For quantitative data on the leadership of Johns Hopkins in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, see Kevles, “Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry,” pp. 161–172. More generally, see Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1960); and Laurence R. Vesey, The Emergence of the American University ( Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965 ).
Erlanger to Cannon, 10 March 1913, Erlanger Papers, box 2, f. 12.
Laszlo, “Physiology of the Future,” pp. 88.
See George Anastoplo, “Physiology at the University of Chicago,” unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, Program in History of Science, pp. 25–41.
Ibid.
Price Little Scienceesp. pp. 40–46, 49–51. Yet despite such Galtonian passages, Price elsewhere seemed to recognize that the “built-in undemocracy” of scientific productivity also depended on institutional factors and social opportunities. See, e.g., ibid., pp. 54–59. A few years later he made the point more explicitly in Price, “The Scientific Foundations of Science Policy,” Nature Lond. 206 (1965): 233–238, esp. 235–236. Cf. Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science” [1968], in Merton The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigationsed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 457, n. 45.
On research schools and their advantages as a unit of historical analysis, see Geison, “Scientific Change, Emerging Specialties, and Research Schools,” in History of Science,19 (1981): 2040.
Between 1898 and 1918, Carlson published ninety-three papers in the American Journal of Physiology. Had he been an “institution,” that level of productivity would have placed him between Harvard and Cornell Medical School on Table 8.
See Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science,” pp. 439–459, esp. 457–459.
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Geison, G.L. (1987). International Relations and Domestic Elites in American Physiology, 1900–1940. In: Geison, G.L. (eds) Physiology in the American Context 1850–1940. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7528-6_6
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