Homeostasis: Birth of a Concept

The tendency toward internal stabilization of the animal body was first recognized by Claude Bernard, great French physiologist of the nineteenth century who, through his studies of blood glucose and liver glycogen, first discovered internal secretions. From a lifetime of study and experimentation gradually grew the principle for which this retiring and lonely man is best remembered, that of constancy of the internal environment, a principle that in time would pervade physiology and medicine. Years later, at Harvard University, American physiologist Walter B. Cannon (Figure 30-1) reshaped and restated Bernard's idea. From his studies of the nervous system and reactions to stress, he described the ceaseless balancing and rebalancing of physiological processes that maintain stability and restore the normal state when it has been disturbed. He also gave it a name: homeostasis. The term soon flooded the medical literature of the 1930s. Physicians spoke of getting their patients back into homeostasis. Even politicians and sociologists saw what they considered deep non physiological implications. Cannon enjoyed this broadened application of the concept and later suggested that democracy was the form of government that took a homeostatic middle course. Despite the enduring importance of the homeostasis concept, Cannon never received the Nobel Prize-one of several acknowledged oversights of the Nobel Committee. Late in life, Cannon expressed his ideas about scientific research in his autobiography, The Way of an Investigator. This engaging book describes there sourceful career of a homespun man whose life embodied the traits that favor successful research.