Volume 1

The collected papers of Sydney Ringer.

  • Ringer, Sydney, 1835-1910.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The collected papers of Sydney Ringer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    IN MEMORY OF SIDNEY RINGER [1885-1910] SOME ACCOUNT OF THE FUNDAMENTAL DISCOVERIES OF THE GREAT PIONEER OF THE BIO-CHEMISTRY OF CRYSTALLO-COLLOIDS IN LIVING CELLS It is often notable, on consulting the original writings of master- workers in any domain of knowledge, to what an extent these contain, crystallized out in single sentences, or short paragraphs, discoveries of great beauty or intense importance, which have afterwards been re-discovered and related at ream’s length by subsequent writers. This observation will strike anyone who cares to dive into the original papers of Thomas Graham on colloids, and it is no less striking in the writings of his colleague, Sidney Ringer, on the correlated subject of the crystallo-colloids and the balanced activities of the inorganic constituents in regulating and controlling the energy discharges of living cells. Both physical chemists and bio-chemists have nowadays come to realise that the most fruitful ground of both chemistry and biology lies in the land of colloids, and of colloidal and crystalloidal relationships. It is a remarkable fact that the master-discoveries in these two closelv related domains belong to two men identified with the same institution, who, keen though they were over their experiments, dimly, if at all, realised the vast extensions which lay before their discoveries. Graham does appear to have dimly seen that there was a relationship between the energetics of the colloidal state and the life processes of cells, and draws attention to the fact that colloids are unstable and all the time suffering slow energy changes, while crystalloids are inert and inactive in stable equilibrium. Ringer equally appreciated the importance of the inorganic salts in living processes, in stimulating or vstilling muscular activity, or in varying the velocity of growth and repair in living cells of all types.