Abstract
One hundred years ago, on November 1, 1847, Walter Holbrook Gaskell was born at Naples. Gaskell was a physiologist to whom medicine continues to owe a deep and lasting debt. He was a mathematician by training, and on Michael Foster's advice he went in 1874 to Leipzig to Ludwig's laboratory, in those days the most important centre of physiological research in Europe. On his return he took up physiology as a career, being appointed lecturer at Cambridge in 1883. Gaskell laid the secure foundation for our knowledge of the pathology of the heart and of the autonomic nervous system. In a series of ingenious and conclusive experiments he showed that the beat of the heart is due to automatic rhythmic contractions of the heart muscle and to the wave of excitation flowing from sinus venosus to bulbus arteriosus and from muscle fibre to muscle fibre. By his zigzag incisions of heart muscle he proved the continuity of the rhythmic wave. He introduced the terms and conceptions ‘heart block’, ‘fibrillation’, and ‘gallop-rhythm’ into the literature, and was one of the pioneers in the galvaiiometric investigation of the heart. In 1890, at the request of the Hyderabad Commission, he investigated the action of chloroform. His fascinating book “The Origin of Vertebrates” appeared in 1908. As a lecturer Gaskell was popular and inspiring, though he was not eloquent. A big man physically and intellectually, his strength and his weakness lay in his love of generalizations, which sometimes led him to victory and as often led him astray. He died on September 7, 1914, in his sixty-seventh year.
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Walter Holbrook Gaskell (1847–1914). Nature 160, 561 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160561c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160561c0