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6th APS President (1914-1916)
Walter Bradford Cannon
(1871-1945)
Walter B. Cannon's three years as president of APS coincided with the
early years of the Federation. Perhaps the most important event of his
presidency, one that required extremely delicate handling on his part,
occurred in his first two months in office, when Porter resigned as editor
of the American Journal of Physiology and the Society assumed
ownership and management of the journal.
Cannon was born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where, at Fort Crawford
in the 1820s, Beaumont had carried out some of his celebrated experiments on
St. Martin. Attracted to the biological sciences as an undergraduate at
Harvard, Cannon began working in Bowditch's laboratory as a first-year
student at Harvard Medical School in 1896. That year he began an innovative
investigation in which he used the newly discovered X rays to study the
mechanism of swallowing and the motility of the stomach. He demonstrated
deglutition in a goose at the APS meeting in December 1896 and published his
first paper on this research in the first issue of the American Journal
of Physiology in January 1898. In 1900 he received his medical degree
and became a member of APS.
Cannon became an instructor in the Department of Physiology at Harvard in
1900 and was promoted to assistant professor in 1902. When Bowditch retired
in 1906, Cannon succeeded him as Higginson Professor and chairman of the
department, a position he retained until 1942. He headed one of the most
active departments in the country, where students from around the world were
trained. Cannon's early research on gastrointestinal motility led to
pioneering research on the physiological basis of the emotions and to the
development of the concept of the emergency function of the sympathetic
nervous system. During World War I he studied problems of traumatic shock.
His later research on the sympathetic nervous system and neurochemical
transmission of nerve impulses culminated in his enunciation and development
of the key physiological concept of homeostasis. He was the author of A
Laboratory Course in Physiology (1910 and subsequent editions), The
Mechanical Factors of Digestion (1911), Bodily Changes in Pain,
Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915, 2nd ed. 1929), Traumatic Shock
(1923), The Wisdom of the Body (1932), Digestion and Health
(1936), Autonomic Neuro-effector Systems (1937, with Arturo
Rosenblueth), and The Way of an Investigator (1945), which was
reprinted and distributed as a souvenir volume at the XXIV IUPS Congress
held in Washington, D.C., in 1968.
Cannon's service to APS extended over a period of nearly forty years. He
scarcely missed a meeting between his election to APS and his death in 1945.
He was a member of Council from 1905 to 1920; he served as treasurer from
1905 to 1913 and was a member of the Conference Committee that established
the Federation in 1912. From 1908 to 1926, as chairman of the Committee on
Defense of Medical Research of the American Medical Association, he directed
the defense of animal experimentation against the antivivisectionists and
kept the Society informed of the state of the problem. When the XIII
International Physiological Congress was held at Boston in 1929, Cannon was
host in charge of local arrangements. In the 1930s he was the American
representative to the International Committee that organized the congresses.
At the fiftieth anniversary of the Society in 1938, Cannon presented a
tribute to his teacher, Bowditch, at the celebratory banquet. He is
commemorated by the Society through the Walter B. Cannon Memorial Lecture, a
plenary lecture given at the spring meeting of the Society and sponsored by
the Grass Foundation.
Selected Publications
1. Anonymous. Walter Bradford Cannon. Physiologist 6: 4-5, 1963.
2. Barger, A. C. New technology for a new century: Walter B. Cannon and
the invisible rays. Physiologist 24(5): 6-14, 1981.
3. Benison, S., and A. C. Barger. Walter Bradford Cannon. In:
Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner, 1978, vol. 15,
p. 71-77.
4. Fleming, D. Walter Bradford Cannon. In: Dictionary of American
Biography. New York: Scribner, 1973, suppl. 3, p. 133-137.
5. Howell, W. H., and C. W. Greene. History of the American
Physiological Society Semicentennial, 1887-1937. Baltimore, MD: Am.
Physiol. Soc., 1938, p. 94-96.
6. Ring, G. C. Walter Bradford Cannon, born October 19, 1871, died
October 1, 1945. Physiologist 1(5): 37-42, 1958.
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