The President’s broadcast on 6 March 1952 on Sir Charles Sherrington (1857-1952)
Sir Charles Sherrington took his medical degree nearly seventy years ago, when, as he once said, all the professors and lecturers wore beards or side whiskers ; and one of his first undertakings was a visit to Spain in 1885 to study an outbreak of cholera. After that he settled down to research on the brain and the nerves, and he went on with this till he retired from his professorship at Oxford seventeen years ago. What he did was to give us an entirely new outlook on the working of the nervous system, the way in which the sense organs are linked to the brain and the brain to the muscles to form the great controlling apparatus of the body, the intelligence system and headquarters which direct every movement we make : so that we keep our balance on two legs and go where we want and behave, in fact, like living people. For instance, one of the first things he found out was that there is a signalling arrangement in every muscle which keeps its movement under control by sending back information to the nervous system about the force the muscle is exerting at each moment. Nowadays we call this a feed-back mechanism ; its importance in our own bodies has become more and more obvious because the same kind of arrangement is now used by engineers for controlling the movement of heavy machinery.