GASKELL, WALTER HOLBROOK - A CLASSIC PAPER IN NEUROSCIENCE.

The Croonian Lecture. - On the Rhytm of the Heart and the Frog, and the Nature of the Action of the Vagus Nerve. Read December 22, 1881.

(London, Harrison and Sons, 1883). 4to. No wrappers as extracted from "Philosophical Transactions" Year 1882, Volume 173 - 1883. - Pp. 993-1033 and 5 plates (1 heliogravure (instrument), 4 folded recordings).

First edition of Gaskell's classic in neuroscience on the musculature and innervation of the heart.
"In the Croonian lecture for 1881, dealing with the frog heart, Gaskell presented an important new method for studying heart action (later named the "suspension method") and insisted that cardiac inhibition depended less on nerve or ganglionic mechanisms than on the inherent properties of the cardiac musculature. The role of the vagus nerve in inhibition was reduced to that of being the “trophic” (anabolic) nerve of the cardiac muscle. Yet in the same lecture Gaskell produced impressive evidence against Foster’s myogenic theory of rhythmicity and advocated instead the neurogenic view that discontinuous ganglionic discharges are responsible for the rhythmicity of the normal heartbeat. The background to this defection was exceedingly complex, but it derived from an initial assumption (which Foster himself accepted) that ganglionic impulses - whatever their role in rhythmicity - are somehow involved in coordinating the normal sequence of the vertebrate heartbeat."(DSB).
Garrison & Morton, 829.

Order-nr.: 51495