The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Dr. Jackson (1865-1958) was a pioneer in laryngology who specialized in removing items accidentally swallowed or inhaled. He developed many of the instruments used to extract foreign objects and collected 2,374 dislodged items, which today are housed in a museum at Philadelphia’s College of Physicians. Though considered cold and remote by those who knew him, Jackson saved hundreds of lives and is regarded as a giant of medicine.

Three doctors who worked at Guy’s Hospital in 1830s London made major contributions to medicine and are called the “Three Greats.” Thomas Addison figured out appendicitis, was an expert on anemia, and has five diseases named after him, including Addison’s Disease, a degeneration of the adrenal glands, the most famous sufferer of which was U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Richard Bright discovered Bright’s Disease, or nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys. Thomas Hodgkin studied the lymphatic system and is known for Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. 

Harvard physiologist Cannon did groundbreaking work during the early 20th century on the body’s autonomic nervous system—automatic processes like breathing, digesting, and pumping blood—and discovered peristalsis, “the muscular pushing of food through the digestive tract” (189). Cannon’s book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage was an important textbook, and his The Wisdom of the Body became well known. Cannon studied the adrenaline rush of sudden crisis and coined the term “fight or flight” (189). Mt. Cannon in Glacier National Park is named for Cannon and his wife, who in 1901 were the first to scale it. 

Wesleyan chemistry professor Atwater was an early proponent of the study of nutrition as a science and the calorie as a measure of food energy. In the late 1800s, he performed extensive experiments on volunteers who lived in a cabinet-sized room, the “respiratory calorimeter,” for up to five days. Atwater’s team measured the food they ate, the gases they exhaled, their urine and excrement, and other variables. Using this data, he calculated the caloric energy of 4,000 different foods. His book The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials made him famous. Atwater reached many erroneous conclusions—he believed the only value of food was its energy content, and that people should eat lots of meat and avoid fruits and vegetables—but his research helped put nutrition science on a sound footing.

Smith worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the late 1800s as a bacteriologist, where he discovered two of the causes of food poisoning, Babesia and Salmonella—the latter named for Smith’s department head, Daniel Salmon—and made contributions to the understanding of several infectious diseases. His work on tuberculosis, which he proved could jump from cows to humans, led to the sterilization of milk through pasteurization. 

In 1905, Dr. Stevens discovered the Y chromosome and its significance in determining gender. Stevens earned her BA and MA from Stanford, won a fellowship to Italy in cell studies, and received a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr in 1903, where she worked until her untimely death from breast cancer in 1912. During her short career, Stevens published 38 papers, including her Y chromosome discovery. Her work might have earned her a Nobel Prize, but for many years her discovery was misattributed to another scientist.