'In 1891, John Smyth Macdonald had been appointed a Holt Fellow at Liverpool under the then-holder of the professorial chair, Francis Gotch. By 1899, he had attained the rank of Senior Lecturer, and had moved away from Gotch's emphasis on relating galvanometric changes to changes in body temperature (O'Connor 1991, 335-336). Instead, Macdonald began to identify electrical variability with interactions between nerve cells and their environments. Casting the production of current following the lesion of a nerve in terms of an osmotic 'concentration cell', he suggested that the rapidity of transmission of electricity through a nerve was not due to its internal polarization alone, but also to its compartmentalization in relation to its immediate environment (Macdonald 1900).'