Person

Sherrington, Charles Scott, Sir

1857-1952

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was born on November 27th 1857 at Islington, London. He began his medical studies at St. Thomas’ Hospital. He studied physiology under Michael Foster at Cambridge, where he fostered his interest in neurology. In 1885, Sherrington published a paper on the effects of excisions on the cortex of dogs, which had become a heated topic at a medical congress in London years before. Sherrington obtained his Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1884 and a First Class in the Natural Sciences Trips at Cambridge with distinction. He obtained his Medicinae Baccalaureus degree at Cambridge in 1885 and his Licentiate of Royal College of Physicians in 1886.

Sherrington journeyed to Spain in 1885 as a member of the Committee of the Association for Research in Medicine to study the outbreak of cholera and again in 1886 to Venice. In 1887, Sherrington was appointed Lecturer in Systematic Physiology at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London and was elected a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. In 1891 he was appointed successor to Sir Victor Horsley as the Professor and Superintendent of the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and Pathological Research in London. In 1895 he became the Professor of Physiology at the University of Liverpool.

Sherrington published several papers about the problems of spinal reflexes during 1891 and on efferent nerve supply of nerve muscles between 1892-1894. He published The Integrative Action of the Nervous System in 1906. In 1913, he became the Waynfleet Professor of Physiology at Oxford, where he remained until he retired in 1936.

His honors include being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1893. He was awarded the Royal Medal in 1905 and the Copley Medal in 1927. In 1922, he was conferred the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and the Order of Merit in 1924. Sherrington was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932 along with Edgar Douglas Adrian for their discoveries regarding functions of neurons. He held honorary doctorates at the Universities of Oxford, London, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, Strasbourg, Louvain, Uppsala, Lyons, Budapest, Athens, Brussels, Berne, Toronto, Montreal and Harvard.

He died of heart failure in Eastborne in 1952.