'Though experimental intervention in nerves had become increasingly routine for French and  German physiologists by the 1860s, and the phenomenon in which nerves disintegrated following the introduction of a lesion to them had been described by Augustus Volney Waller as early as 1850, it was only during the 1870s and 1880s - when Sherrington was a student at Cambridge - that 'degeneration' studies began to be taken up by British physiologists in any systematic manner (Lesch 1984, 175-178, 191-196; Clarke and Jacyna 1987, 197-202, 249-259; Lawrence 2009, 456-457, 464-466).'