Charles Scott Sherrington

Waynflete Chair of Physiology, Magdalen College, Oxford

Man on His Nature

In his series of lectures, Sherrington surveys the nature of humans and their place in the universe from the perspective of the natural sciences. He evaluates moral intuition and compares his work with that of Jean Pernel. Asserting that the most fundamental category of the physical world is energy and that the structure of things is ‘granular’, he concludes that organisms have a similar ‘granularity’ in cell structure and the nervous impulse. 

Biography

Charles Scott Sherrington was born on 27 November 1857 in London. An English physiologist, he established the theory of ‘reciprocal innervation’, later known as ‘Sherrington’s Law’. Appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy at Cambridge in 1883, he went on to study cholera outbreaks in Europe. Afterward, he was elected Fellow of Gonville and Caius and appointed Lecturer in Systematic Physiology at Cambridge. Following positions at the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and Pathological Research and the University of Liverpool, he was made Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford in 1913.

Awarded honorary doctorates from over twenty universities, he was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1893, received the Royal Medal in 1905, the Copley Medal in 1927, and appointed OBE in 1922. In 1932, he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology with E.D. Adrian. Prominent works include The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906), Mammalian Physiology: A Course of Practical Exercises (1919), The Assaying of Brabantius and Other Verse (1925), Selected Writings of Sir Charles Sherrington (1939), and The Endeavour of Jean Fernel (1946). 

Published/Archival Resources
Published as Man on His Nature.