Mechanisms of transmission in the central nervous system / by W.D.M. Paton.

  • Paton, William D. M.
Date:
[1959?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mechanisms of transmission in the central nervous system / by W.D.M. Paton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    #8 X Mechanisms of transmission in the central nervous system W. D. M. PATON, dm, frs My first duty, most willingly discharged, is to express my appreciation of being asked to give the Clover Lecture. I have to confess that my knowledge of Joseph Clover was mainly of his inhaler and that he trained and practised at the best medical school in London. It has been a pleasure to discover, with the help of Mr Lefanu and my own old University College Hospital Magazines, that he was an experi¬ mentalist, willing to undertake the discipline of designing apparatus as well as using it, of an attractive, gentle, yet evidently tenacious disposition, and one of whom friends - including such as Sydney Ringer - spoke in unusually affectionate terms. It is always interest¬ ing to wonder what great men of the past would have done if they lived today. Perhaps, as then, a clinical interest and skill in making and using apparatus might have directed him to anaesthetic research; or perhaps this bent was acquired when, as a medical student, he saw the first operation under ether in Britain, when Robert Liston amputated the leg of Frederick Churchill, a butler, in the leisurely time, by the anaesthetist’s estimate, of twenty-eight seconds. I hope that today’s subject might have been of interest to him; perhaps it might have been his chosen field. Work on the central nervous system has particular interest for anaesthetists, since any major discovery in this field promises to have a speedy practical significance. From the spate of work in progress, one might imagine that in fact we are advancing rapidly in our understand¬ ing of such matters. In some respects this is true; we know much more about the activity of particular cells and about their functional con¬ nections, and we have a formidable array of drugs with which central nervous activity can be modified. But intense activity sometimes con¬ ceals ignorance. If one probes deeper with one’s questions, into, say, the mechanism of action of an anaesthetic, one arrives with something of a shock at the discovery that we have no adequate idea how one nerve cell provokes or restrains the activity of another, although it is on these basic mechanisms that all the higher integrations are The Joseph Clover Lecture, 1958 3