''In 1850, a British physician, Augustus Volney Waller, published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the object of which, he said, ‘is to describe certain alterations which take place in the elementary fibres of the nerve after they have been removed from their connection with the brain or spinal marrow’. Waller had received an MD from Paris in 1840, carried out research in Bonn, practised medicine in London and was one of that small cohort of English practitioners promoting the introduction of German science into British medicine. In his paper Waller reported that he had experimentally severed the hypoglossal and glossopharyngeal nerves of frogs and examined the remnants microscopically. He noted that while the proximal portion of the nerves remained normal, the distal portions underwent change. They were ‘disorganized’, showed a ‘kind of coagulation’, and were ‘disjointed’. [note: 'Augustus Volney Waller, ‘Experiments on the Section of the Glossopharyngeal and Hypoglossal Nerves of the Frog, and Observations on the Alterations Produced thereby in the Structure of their Primitive Fibres’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 140 (1850), 423-29, 425, 426.'] This description is now regarded as ‘classic’, and the change in the nerve after section is called ‘Wallerian degeneration’.' (456-457)