The life and death of laboratory teaching of medical physiology: a personal narrative. Part I.

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.