Advances in Physiology Education, Vol 264, Issue 6 16-S23, Copyright © 1993 by American Physiological Society
The life and death of laboratory teaching of medical physiology: a personal narrative. Part I
H. W. Davenport
Department of Physiology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor 48109-0622.
Part I of this essay sketches the history of laboratory teaching of medical
physiology in England from the perspective of the author as a student at
Oxford from 1935 to 1938. The systematic laboratory teaching that began in
the 1870s at University College London under William Sharpey was carried to
Oxford, as well as to other English and Scottish universities, by Sharpey's
junior colleagues. C. S. Sherrington added mammalian experiments, and C. G.
Douglas and J. G. Priestley added experiments on human subjects. The author
describes his experience as a student in the Oxford courses and tells how
he learned physiology by teaching it from 1941 to 1943 in the laboratory
course established at the University of Pennsylvania by Oxford-trained
physiologist Cuthbert Bazett.
