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10th APS President (1923-1925)
Anton Julius Carlson
(1875-1956)
Carlson was president of APS during exciting years for American
physiology. In the first year of his term, papers on newly discovered
insulin were featured at the Federation meeting. That year Carlson presented
an invitation at Edinburgh on behalf of APS to hold the next International
Physiological Congress in America. The invitation, reissued in 1926, was
accepted for the 1929 congress.
One of the most colorful characters in the history of American
physiology, Carlson was born in Sweden and came to America alone in 1891,
knowing scarcely any English. Abandoning his initial plan of entering the
ministry, he received a Ph.D. degree in physiology at Stanford in 1902 under
O. P. Jenkins, with a dissertation on the rate of the nerve impulse in
mollusks. At Woods Hole in 1904 he acquired a reputation by his studies on
the heart of the horseshoe crab Limulus, which showed that the
cardiac nerves controlled the heartbeat. In 1904 he joined the Department of
Physiology at the University of Chicago, where he became professor in 1914
and chairman in 1916, positions he held until 1940. Known by his students
with affection and awe as "Ajax," he presided over the most prolific
department in the country for the training of physiologists.
After 1909 Carlson turned from comparative to mammalian physiology. He
worked, often in association with his colleague at Chicago, Arno B.
Luckhardt, on the hunger mechanism, the physiology of the thyroid and
parathyroid, the pancreas, and the visceral sensory nervous system. He was
the author of The Control of Hunger in Health and Disease (1916) and
of the popular textbook, The Machinery of the Body (1941), written
with Victor Johnson.
Elected to APS in 1904, Carlson served on Council for a total of thirteen
years. As secretary of APS from 1909 to 1914, during the period of the
founding of the Federation, he became the first secretary of the Executive
Committee of the Federation. He long took an active role in APS
publications, first as a member of the Publications Committee (1912-14),
when Porter was editing the journal, and later as chairman of the Board of
Editors of Physiological Reviews (1932-50). At APS meetings he was
well known and at times feared for his aggressive and pungent criticism of
papers. Long active in civic affairs, in 1946 with his former student, A. C.
Ivy, he founded the National Society for Medical Research to educate the
public on the dangers of antivivisectionist legislation. Ivy wrote of him,
"The influence of a zeal for the truth, a critical judgment, a colorful
personality and dynamic teaching has nowhere been better exemplified than in
the life of Dr. Carlson."
Selected Publications
1. Dragstedt, L. R. Anton Julius Carlson, January 29, 1875-September 2,
1956. Biogr. Mem. Natl. Acad. Sci. 35: 1-32, 1961.
2. Dragstedt, L. An American by choice: a story about Dr. A. J. Carlson.
Perspect. Biol. Med. 7: 145-158, 1963-64.
3. Garrett, C. G. B. Anton Julius Carlson. In: Dictionary of American
Biography. New York: Scribner, 1980, suppl. 6, p. 99-100.
4. Howell, W. H., and C. W. Greene. History of the American
Physiological Society Semicentennial, 1887-1937. Baltimore, MD: Am.
Physiol. Soc., 1938, p. 122-124.
5. Ingle, D. J. Anton J. Carlson: a biographical sketch. Perspect.
Biol. Med. 22(2), part 2: S114-S136, 1979.
6. Ivy, A. C. Anton Julius Carlson. Physiologist 2(2): 33-39,
1959. (Reprinted in Physiologist 10: 1-6, 1967.)
7. Visscher, M. B. Anton Julius Carlson. In: Dictionary of Scientific
Biography. New York: Scribner, 1971, vol. 3, p. 68-70.
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