Sir Charles Scott SherringtonBorn 27 Nov 1857; died 4 Mar 1952 at age 94. English neurophysiologist who won (with Edgar Adrian) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932 for research into the function of the neuron. Sherrington proposed the key concept of nociception: pain as the evolved response to a potentially harmful, "noxious" stimulus in 1898. In his book, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, (1906) he compared various sensory stimuli (such as those which normally elicit pain or nociception vs. those evoking the scratch reflect) competing in the production of various behavioral responses using the same motor pathways, in what he called "the struggle between dissimilar arcs for mastery over their final common path." |