Cannon, Walter

More than a century ago Claude Bernard speculated that the milieu interne must be maintained to preserve life (B17). Later, Walter Cannon indicated that physical disturbances could elicit a coordinative response of the organism to keep homeostasis (C7). The stress concept of Hans Selye noted that these stimuli that disturbed the physical integrity of the organism resulted in a general adaptation... 

Sternberg, Esther M., Walter B. Cannon and Voodoo Death A Perspective from 60 Years On , American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 10 (2002) 1564-66... 

During the summers of 1948-1951,1 began to carry out research on the autonomic nervous system working in the laboratory of Curt Richter, Professor of Psychobiology at Johns Hopkins. He introduced me to the work of his heroes Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon in Boston and Hans Selye in Montreal. Dr. Richter took me to visit Selye, an endocrinologist in the Biochemistry Department at McGill University. 

Hostility, aggressiveness and violent behavior involve the hypothalamus, limbic system, and brain stem. At Harvard, Walter Cannon showed that removal of the cerebral cortex in experimental animals led to anger when the animal was slightly provoked, which he called sham rage. Phillip Bard in the Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins carried out extensive studies of this phenomenon while 1 was a medical student. 

The insula, which lies between the temporal and parietal cortex, plays a major role in addiction. Neuronal action potentials from autonomic physiological events play a major role in emotions. Walter Cannon proposed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that the autonomic nervous system brings emotions to consciousness. The anterior insula collects olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic data, whereas the posterior insula is involved with auditory, somesthetic, and skeletomotor functions. fMRI indicates that the insula plays a major role in the experience of pain, anger, fear, disgust, happiness, and sadness. 

Lim followed up his observation that when a dog eats a bone, a meal of bulk only, the dog s stomach secretes acid by returning to his earlier study of the effect of distention on gastric secretion. With H-C Chang he demonstrated that distention of a pouch of the pyloric part of the stomach resulted in secretion by the dog s Hei-denhain pouch. Lim considered the possibility that the effect was mediated by a reflex through sympathetic nerves or that in some way distention of the pyloric pouch releases the Heidenhain pouch from inhibition. By this time (1931) Lim was aware of the work of Otto Loewi and of Walter B. Cannon in demonstrating chemical mediation of nerve impulses, and he concluded that mechanical irritation of the pylorus involves the neuroendocrine mechanism of liberation of a hormone. ... 

By the time Walter B. Cannon began to study salivary digestion of starch in the stomach at the end of the nineteenth century, chemists and biochemists had provided adequate knowledge of the chemistry of starch and sugars. 

Walter B. Cannon knew nothing of the facts just summarized when as a first- and second-year medical student at Harvard in 1896-98 he made his first observations on the effect of gastric motility in mixing gastric contents. He had read the literature by the time he pasted together his papers on the mechanical factors of digestion and published them as a book in 1911 Cannon s earliest reference then was Home, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy. London, 1814, i, p. 140. ... 

Merritt, E.K., Cannon, M.V., Hammers, D.W., Le, L.N., Gokhale, R., Sarathy, A., Song, TJ., Tierney, M.T., Suggs, L.J., Walters, T.J., Farrar, R.P., 2010a. Repair of traumatic skeletal muscle injury with bone-marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells seeded on extraceUular matrix. Tissue Eng. Part A 16, 2871—2881. 

Walter JF, Paaso BT, Cannon WB (1976) Successful transcatheter embolic control of massive hematobilia secondary to liver biopsy. Am J Roentgenol 127 847-849... 

---