THE PRINCIPAL STRUCTURES OF PHYSIOLOGY: WHAT AND WHERE ARE THEY? THE CASE
OF BARCROFT'S ARCHITECTURE
K.B. Roberts, D.Phil
Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
A1B 3V6
APStracts 5:0008S, 1998.
ABSTRACT
[The history of a science represents that science.] J.W. von Goethe
Joseph Barcroft, of the University of Cambridge, England, published in 1934 a
monograph: Features in the architecture of physiological function. It was
reprinted in 1938. His intent when writing the book was to make explicit the
general principles he had discerned during his long experience as researcher
and teacher of physiology. He was approaching physiology from an unusual
angle: "not from that of mere structure, whether the structure of organs or of
chemical formulae, but from the principles of function." In that way it
differed from the generality of physiological texts in which the systems are
considered, for the most part, independently of each other. It differed also
in that its primary object was not to convey information but to assist
thinking about known physiological processes. In order to do this, the circle
must be completed by using information obtained from experiments. In this case
the experiments were often Barcroft's own. The reader therefor gathers
information and thinks about interacting processes at one and the same time.
Barcroft does not make any theoretical fuss about any of this, regarding it as
the obvious way to proceed.
Received 19 March 1998; accepted in final form 19 March 1998.
APS Manuscript Number S14-8.
Article publication pending Advances in Physiology Education.
ISSN 1080-4757 Copyright 1998 The American Physiological Society.
Published in APStracts on 24 April 1998