Selected Writings of Sir Charles Sherrington

A., E. D.

doi:10.1038/145166a0

Books Received
Published: 03 February 1940

Selected Writings of Sir Charles Sherrington

E. D. A.

Nature volume 145, pages 166–167 (1940)Cite this article

50 Accesses
Metrics details

Abstract

NEUROLOGISTS will open this volume with the highest expectations and will not be disappointed. It is a testimonial to Sir Charles Sherrington made up of extracts from his writings and edited by a colleague who has been in close touch with all his later work. True, it would need an incredibly bad editor to spoil the effect of such remarkable material, but Dr. Denny Brown has been a very good editor indeed. By a careful choice of extracts and the use of occasional connecting passages he has made a series of chapters, each complete in itself and each dealing with a particular theme. Some of the chapters are mainly derived from early papers, for example, on the nerve roots, some from the work at Liverpool or at Oxford, but most of them contain extracts from several sources and show the development of the subject in Sherrington's hands as well as his final judgment on it. We see the detailed mapping of motor and sensory supply, followed by the classical analysis of reflex activity in the spinal animal. Several aspects of reflex co-ordination Lave chapters to themselves, and considerable space is naturally given to the discussion of reciprocal innervation. One chapter is derived from the paper with Grünbaum on the motor area of the brain, and the last two deal with more recent work on the intimate nature of excitation and inhibition and on the adjustment of muscular contraction. There has been no attempt to include many of the topics dealt with in the book which had such a decisive effect on the progress of neurology, the "Integrative Action of the Nervous System", for the present volume is designed as a companion and a supplement to it.

Selected Writings of Sir Charles Sherrington

A Testimonial presented by the Neurologists forming the Guarantors of the Journal Brain. Compiled and edited by D. Denny Brown. Pp. xiv + 532. (London: Hamish Hamilton Medical Books, 1939.) 25s. net.