Quotes 'Evening Party', Cambridge Independent Press, Friday 24 March 1893.
Description:

'On the 20^th March 1893, the Cambridge School of Physiology threw a party. The occasion was a prestigious one. One of the most respected physiologists of the previous [c. 30] years had arrived on a visit to the country. That he – a German citizen – had accepted an honorary degree from the university was cause for celebration in itself. But for the scholars that had spent as many as twenty years building up this brand new school, Rudolph Virchow’s presence in the city represented more than the passing by of a scientific dignitary. It was an opportunity to show that British physiology had begun to rival the longstanding dominance of the field by German scholars; to show that the Cambridge School of Physiology had arrived.

The Cambridge Independent Press reported that the scholars of Cambridge put on a bewildering variety of scientific demonstrations, shows and lectures for the visiting professor. These included the presentation of such familiar objects and devices to historians of physiology as galvanometers, reaction-time chronographs, sphygmographs and other measuring, recording, and inscription devices. But other, rather less familiar items to historians of the field were also on display. The walls of the venue were decorated by ‘a number of specimens of curtains and mats from different parts of the world’. One offering included ‘a series of Saxon fibulae and other ornaments... two ancient Peruvian copper plaques. Eleven human flesh forks from Fiji... [and] preserved human heads from New Zealand.’ Not only were the displays decidedly anthropological; of three lectures given, two – by the embryologist John Graham Kerr and the physiologist Lim Boon Keng – concerned the culture of non-European peoples. Conventions surrounding the separation of men and women at Victorian conversaziones were clearly flouted. A considerable proportion of attendees were fellows of the newly-established Girton and Newnham colleges for women students. Finally, a range of printing techniques were made available for inspection, including photogrammic ‘diazotype printing’, ‘printing boards made of wood and of palm leaves’, and ‘photolithographs of 29 patterns of coloured bark cloth made by the Fijians.’[1] All of this took place in the pathological laboratory. The physiology of late 1890s Cambridge was rather more than the outcome of a set of careful experiments by British men working alone in isolated rooms.'

Quotes C.A. Ballance and C.S. Sherrington, 'On Formation of Scar-Tissue', Journal of Physiology 10 (6), (1889), pp. 550-578.
Description:

Ballance and Sherringon cited Greenwood’s work extensively in their 1889 paper.

we were… much assisted in the interpretation of the appearances of the osmic fixed preparations by the processes described by Miss M. Greenwood for the Rhizopoda… In our preparations we had as it were a number of amoebae, many of which had been actively engaged in ingesting living prey, immediately before the reagent had been used that killed them so rapidly as to allow no time for any great departure from their previous aspect.[1]

And again:

Just as, in the extremely interesting observations given by M. Greenwood, little monads, Euglena and Algae coexisting in the same water with Amoeba proteus were by it ingested, so leucocytes become the prey of the plasma-cell, and are by it included and ingested.[2]

Sherrington and Ballance’s success on the prominent stage of one of the first truly international medical congresses was no doubt due in considerable degree to their own skill and dedication to their work. Yet Ballance’s dramatic recollection of his and Sherrington's ‘conversion’ of Zeigler to their conception of leukocyte function obscures the broader context from which their study arose. Greenwood’s work not only informed the topic of study of the pair, but provided them with a conceptual lens through which they interpreted their  wandering cells. Ballance and Sherrington's performance in Germany had at least in part been written, if not directed, by their Girton and Newnham colleague.

Quotes C.A. Ballance, 'Remarks and Reminiscences', British Medical Journal (8th January 1927), pp. 64-67.
Description:

'Ballance recalled in 1927 that his and Sherrington’s presentation of the conclusions of an 1889 Journal of Physiology paper on Leukocytes had had a profound impact on the veteran microscopist. Noting that their paper had revealed ‘a vision of the cellular processes, not only in a healing wound, but also in disease’, he reminisced on the events following its publication:

the next year (1890) a lantern demonstration of the experimental results was given in Berlin in the Pathological Section of the International Medical Congress, and in the discussion which followed dramatic incident occurred - Ziegler threw over his previous belief in Cohnheim's views and accepted the conclusions of Sherrington and myself with regard to the conduct and fate of the leucocyte and connective tissue cell.[1]'

Quotes H.P.B. Gierke, 'Färberei zu mikroskopischen Zwecken', Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Mikroskopie und für mikroskopische Technik 1 (1884) and 2 (1885), pp. 62-100, 372-408, 497-557, 13-36 and 164-221.
Description:

'In 1884, Hans Paul Bernhard Gierke offered the following sketch of a histologist’s working environment

a layman... marvels most at the array of colours in the quiet work-room. It is not the strange apparatus, the microscope and the microtome with its dangerous-looking knives which first catches the visitor's eye; it becomes riveted to the many gay-coloured objects. He had pictured the microscopic laboratory as bare and monotonous, for in his opinion the scientific material therein becomes visible only upon hundredfold magnification. Instead, the brightly lighted room shines with the splendour of gay colour. In cupboards and on the tables are all sorts of flasks, with large and small dishes containing coloured substances and sparkling liquids, while everywhere on the tables are little glass plates to which objects, shining with all the colours of the rainbow, are fastened.[1]

Gierke’s sketch foregrounds not the conventionally understood tools of the histological trade – lenses, microscopes, slides and lamps – but an aspect of the science that has received surprisingly little attention from its’ historians: stains.'

Quotes J.N. Langley, 'On the Changes in Serous Glands during Secretion', Journal of Physiology 2 (4) (1879), pp. 261-322.
Description:

'On the final page of an extensive article published in an early issue of the Journal of Physiology, its author – the Cambridge physiologist John Newport Langley – made the following rather bland and seemingly innocuous statement:

The actual appearance of the specimens [discussed in this paper] cannot be very accurately represented by the lithographic process; the shaded portions of the figs. including the nuclei should be smooth and homogeneous.[1]

The flatness of Langley’s rhetoric serves to draw attention away from the inadequacies of his representations. Yet at the same time it acknowledges them. Langley had just spent thirty-nine pages building a complex argument regarding the nature of cells found in the ‘sub-maxillary gland’ of the Rabbit, and did not wish his readers to reject his views on the basis of a set of poorly-executed figures. Attributing any failings that they may have had to one of the most important means of conveying histological observations at this time (‘the lithographic process’) directed attention away these visual cues, and onto his written claims. It also subtly shifted responsibility for any rejection of the latter which might occur away from his own submission, and on to the processes by which the journal and its illustrations had been produced.'

Quotes M. Greenwood, 'On the Digestive Process in some Rhizopods', Journal of Physiology 7 (3) (1886), pp. 253-273.
Description:

'Greenwood’s earliest articles describe her concern with amoeboid digestion as arising out of the by-then well-known observation that a ‘characteristic’ feature of Rhizopoda was their ‘constant’ ingestion of matter.[1] Whilst many authors had noted the fact that amoeba appeared to ingest material from their surroundings, the processes by which they assimilated material had remained at the margins of histological discourse...

Noting the existence of ‘but few descriptions which deal at all fully with the mode of ingestion, and fewer which give in detail the changes taking place in ingested bodies’, Greenwood implicitly aligned herself with the founding figures of histology.[2] Her commitment to the investigation of cellular activity would lead her away from some of the more contentious theoretical questions that animated histological discourse at this time, such as those arising out of discussions of protoplasm (on which see below), and towards the a then-emerging conception of amoebae not as inert bodies or substance-producing factories, but as animals species in their own right – as species that could be distinguished by their district habits and behaviours as well as by their fixed anatomical states.'

 

 

'Greenwood's principal interest in her amoeboid actors did not concern the relationships that they had to one another, but rather the conditions under which they assimilated in order to continue their existence. Central to this concern was consideration of the means by which they incorporated matter from their surroundings. As she noted, though a range of scattered observations existed on the ingestion of outside matter by very simple organisms (most of which took their cue from Ehrenberg's famous contentions regarding the presence of 'stomachs' in 'polgastric infusoria'), there had been no systematic study of the processes of amoeboid digestion.[3]'

 

'Whereas histological anatomists 'fixed' cells to their slides as a prelude to colouring them with stains, thereby killing them in the process, Greenwood would encourage her objects of study to assimilate coloured matter whilst they were still alive. She portrayed this strategy as having emerged during a chance observation, during which an amoeba formed a vacuole around 'a Monad... and a green Protococcus' (a type of algae, coloured green by chlorophyll). Over a period of six hours, Greenwood had watched the incorporation of the Protococcus into the body of the amoeba, at the end of which the former had retained its green colour. Though it revealed little regarding the difficult-to-observe process of digestion of algae, Greenwood noted, such observations were 'valuable inasmuch as when the digestive vacuole is gone, colour and contour mark them out from the surrounding endosarc [i.e. bodily matter] of the Amoeba, and therefore help to supply some links in the chain of change from ingestion to ejection.'[4] The greenness of the Protococcus meant that its movement through the amoeba could be observed with ease compared to less colourful ingesta. Brightly-tinted material presented her amoeboid actors with props, through the following of which Greenwood might narrate the processes of unicellular digestion.'

Quotes M. Greenwood, 'On the Digestive Process in some Rhizopods. Part II.', Journal of Physiology 8 (5) (1887), pp. 263-310.
Description:

'In her Rhizopod studies, Greenwood adopted a technique that in some respects paralleled one described in Koch’s above-mentioned studies of 1877. Dissatisfied with what he saw as a lack of reliable depictions of bacteria suspended in their native liquid habitat, Koch had fixed to his microscope slides ‘smears’ of bacteria-containing matter so thin that they presented only a single plane of cellular matter to a microscope lens. From such preparations, Koch had produced photographic depictions of bacterial anatomy that his peers had found deeply convincing.[1] Greenwood would almost certainly have read Koch’s paper, and may well have found in it inspiration for her own studies. Nevertheless, if her techniques were inspired by this source, she adapted them to a very different purpose.

Greenwood created planes of cells not, as did Koch, as prelude to fixing their bodies for observation, but as a means of bringing their living processes into view. Depositing amoeba-carrying water onto a slide, and applying pressure with a coverslip ‘slight enough to allow the emission of short pseudopodia in planes at right angles to the plane of extension’, Greenwood similarly reduced her microscopic subjects to a single surface of analysis.[2] She did not, however, look to stabilize such scenes through fixing and photography. Instead, Greenwood produced with her microscope slides a liquid theatre of cellular activity; a literal two-dimensional stage via which the living drama of the very small might be observed, interacted with, and related.'

 

'These studies revealed a taxonomy of materials that were 'nutrious' and 'innutrious' to microscopic organisms. In the case of the amoeba innutricious substances included 'carmine, Indian ink, litmus, starch-grains and irregular crystalline particles occasionally found in the water supplied to the animal.' In contrast, 'nutritious ingesta, those, that is to say, that are changed after being taken in.. comprise Infusoria, Rotifera, Algae and small fragments of coagulated egg albumen.[3] As this quote makes clear, Greenwood fixed her attention as much on the ingestion of difficult-to-observe organisms as on such bright materials as Indian ink and carmine. But even when observing these former, dyes and stains performed a critical function. In one example, an amoeba had, after six days' observation, been seen to extend a funnel-like projection around a seemingly abandoned vacuole containing 'five extremely small [translucent] Monads and one readily distinguishable carmine grain'. Having re-assimilated these bodies, the amoeba began to digest its prey; 'at 3.30 P.M... all trace of the Monads had gone.; and at 4.30 P.M. it [the vacuole]... was indistinguishable except by memory from an Infusorian holding carmine.'[4] Having been 'ingested together with carmine... colouring matter' enabled Greenwood to follow the 'decrease... in size' of Monads as they were assimilated into the bodies of their new-found hosts.[5]'

 

Quotes Plate XI, Journal of Physiology 15 (4) (1893). Figs. 1-12 from W.B. Hardy and L.B. Keng, 'On the Changes in the Number and Character of the Wandering Cells of the Frog induced by the presence of Urari or of Bacillus Anthracis'.

Quotes Plate XI, Journal of Physiology 15 (4) (1893). Figs. 1-12 from W.B. Hardy and L.B. Keng, 'On the Changes in the Number and Character of the Wandering Cells of the Frog induced by the presence of Urari or of Bacillus Anthracis'.

Quotes W.B. Hardy and L.B. Keng, 'On the Changes in the Number and Character of the Wandering Cells of the Frog induced by the presence of Urari or of Bacillus Anthracis', Journal of Physiology 15 (4) (1893), pp. 361-400.
Description:

'The concerns of two authors centred on the identification and classification of wandering cells in frogs. As with Hardy’s paper on crustacean skin, however, it was not so much the classification of cell-types that the article focused on, but the extent to which different cell-types could be identified as arising out of a single ancestral progenitor – could be, in fact, different manifestations of the same fundamental cell-type. Central to this investigation, as with Balance and Sherrington’s publication, was the possibility that one cell-type might possess the capacity to morph into another. Though wandering cells in frogs are ‘not only sharply marked off from one another by their respective structural characteristics, but also in the way that they behave when foreign substances… are present in the plasma’, there could nevertheless, Lim and Hardy suggested, ‘be no finality in the view’ that each type enjoyed ‘complete independence’.[1] Strikingly, and in sharp contrast with Hardy’s single-authored paper, their conclusions asserted differences between types of cell, and especially their lack of interchangeability: ‘no real loss of identity was observed; nothing was seen which suggests the formation of an eosinophile from a hyaline cell or vice versa’ Indeed, the two had observed ‘the devouring of eosinophile cells by the hyaline cells… One cannot conceive on the hypothesis that the eosinophile and hyaline cells represent merely phases in the development of the same cell, why the one should devour the other’.[2]

To reach their conclusions, Lim and Hardy had looked to the same materials that had animated Greenwood’s studies. But rather than persuade their Crustacean subjects to ingest particles of dye, Lim and Hardy injected it into the bloodstream of the animals directly.'

Quotes W.B. Hardy, 'The Blood-corpuscles of the Crustacea, together with a suggestion as to the Origin of the Crustacean Fibrin-ferment (Part I)', Journal of Physiology 13 (1-2) (1892), pp. 165-190.
Description:

'Though Hardy framed his initial conclusions in relation to Metchkinoff's work, his earliest[check] publication[s?] in the Journal of Physiology drew at least as heavily on Greenwood's studies. These were primarily oriented towards differentiating between different types of cell in the blood of the Astacus, or common crayfish. In line with both Langley and Greenwood's prior attempts to examine cells in states as close to possible to their living conditions, Hardy emphasised that certain constituents of crustacean blood – entities that he referred to as 'exploding cells' – could only be perceived when samples were transferred from the body of an animal to a fixing agent with great rapidity. If the operation were performed quickly enough, it became possible to perceive 'cells... characterized by such extreme sensitiveness to certain stimuli that contact with a foreign body... causes an explosive disruption of their protoplasm.'[1] This property, he found, accorded with the observation of blood in still-living Daphnia (a plankton-like crustacean through the transparent body of which blood could be observed in its living condition). Above all, Hardy emphasised, these corpuscles were characteristic of a 'primitive' state of sanguineous evolution.[2] The blood of Daphnia, and to an extent those of crayfish too, did not display the diversity of cell-types that could be perceived in more complex animal types. Like Doughty's Bedouin tribes and Haddon's Greek, Mayan, and Chinese frets, crustacean blood presented an example of an especially early ‘primitive’ phase of evolutionary progress.'