Abstract
PROF. CORNEILLE HEYMANS is professor of pharmacology in the University of Ghent, being the direct successor in that chair to liis father, the late Prof. J. Z. Heymans, in collaboration with whom hohad carried out researches, involving some of the ingenious methods of cross-circulation and artificial perfusion, which he has later developed in the series of masterly investigations which have just been recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for 1938. Some of Prof. Heymans’ most important work has dealt with the sensory mechanisms in. the vascular system, through which the arterial blood pressure is kept under reflex nervous control. This sensory function of the carotid sinus had been discovered and described by H. E. Hering and E. Koch in Germany, but the work of Heymans greatly extended knowledge of its importance and demonstrated the presence of analogous sensory apparatus in other parts of the vascular system. Heymans also discovered the sensitiveness of the carotid sinus to chemical changes in the blood, and its consequent importance in regulating the activity of the respiratory centre. Prof. Heymans is responsible for many other important advances in physiology and pharmacology, largely concerned with the control of the circulation. He is well known outside his own country, and a frequent and welcome visitor to Great Britain, where his remarkable command of English, as of several other languages, enables him to give clear and fluent accounts of the progress of his researches, and where the honour now done to him will be warmly greeted by his many friends and admirers.
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Nobel Prizes for Physiology and Medicine Prof. C. Heymans. Nature 144, 777 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144777a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144777a0