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).