Walter B. Cannon (1871-1945, APS 1908) was a physiologist and medical educator. He was widely noted for his trailblazing research in gastrointestinal physiology. He was the first to use the technology of X-rays to study gastrointestinal processes. He was a pioneer in studying the influence of emotional states on bodily functions and in "the understanding of nerve transmission and hormonal regulation of the body" (Lederer, p.340) and developed the concept of homeostasis. As a Harvard medical professor, he was the first to apply the case method to teaching systematic medicine. In his position as chairman of the American Medical Association's Defense Committee in Support of Medical Research, he led the fight against the Antivivisectionist movement. His major works include The Mechanical Factors of Digestion (1911), Traumatic Shock (1923), the Wisdom of the Body (1932) and Autonomic Neuro-Effector Systems (1937).

Canon was born on October 19, 1871 at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He was the only son of Colbert Hanchett Canon, a railroad worker and Sarah Wilma Denio, a school teacher. He attended primary schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and St. Paul, Minnesota. At fourteen, when his father was disappointed at the boy's lack of diligence in school, he sent him to work in a railroad office for two years. After he returned to high school, he finished the four-year curriculum in three years, graduating as valedictorian of his class. He took an extra postgraduate year to prepare for college examinations. His English literature teacher Ms. M.J. Newson convinced Cannon to apply to Harvard College and helped to obtain financial aid for him. As a Harvard undergraduate he studied biology and zoology under Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944, APS 1907). He graduated summa cum laude in 1896 and received an M.A. degree from Harvard in 1897. Although he would have preferred to study medicine at Johns Hopkins, his letter to Hopkins's Dean William H. Welch, requesting financial aid went unanswered. Consequently, Cannon remained at Harvard for his medical training, entering the Medical School in the fall of 1896.

During his first year of medical school at Harvard, he followed the suggestion of physiology professor Henry P. Bowditch (1840-1911, APS 1904) that he join a second-year student Albert Moser in an investigation of the phenomena of swallowing and the visceral movements in animals using the recently developed technology of x-rays. Using an x-ray apparatus provided by Dr. Ernest Amory Codman of Massachsetts General Hospital, the two students examined the esophagus of a dog during the process of swallowing or deglutition. An initial demonstration, using pearl buttons revealed nothing. However, recalling the observation of Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered x-rays a year earlier, that salts of heavy metals obstructed the passage of x-rays, they tried the same experiment, using gelatin capsules filled with bismuth subnitrate in a frog and a goose. This time the experiment succeeded, since bismuth subnitrate is opaque to x-rays. At a Boston meeting of the American Physiological Society in late December they repeated the experiment in a goose, using Röntgen's rays. This was the first public demonstration of the movement of the alimentary canal by use of x-ray technology. Cannon's continued investigation into the digestive system would later result in his first monograph, Mechanical Factors of Digestion (1911). In it, he noted with great interest the correlation between emotional disturbances and the digestive process in animal subjects.

While in medical school Cannon also showed himself an educational innovator. Envious of the educational experiences of his roommate, a Harvard law student, who reported that he and his classmates discussed actual legal cases and their implications for practice in class, Cannon suggested a similar pedagogy in a 1900 paper published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. The article, entitled "Case Method of Teaching Systematic Medicine," suggested employing real case histories and hospital data in active classroom discussions instead of the "dreary and benumbing process" of passively listening to lectures and reading texts. The young instructor's new teaching technique was quickly adopted by several departments at the Harvard Medical School and even incorporated by a number of medical texts.

In his last year of medical school Cannon was already working as a zoology instructor at Harvard College, where he taught comparative vertebrate anatomy. After he graduated from medical school in 1900, professor William Townsend Porter encouraged Harvard President Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926, APS 1871) to make Cannon an instructor of physiology. The following year on June 25, 1901 he married a longtime friend Cornelia James, who would later become a best-selling author. In 1902 Cannon advanced to the rank of assistant professor, again with Porter's backing. In 1906, when Cornell Medical School tried to recruit him, President Eliot decided to have Cannon, whose teaching ability made him popular with students, succeed the retiring professor Bowditch as George Higginson Professor of Physiology and department chairman (rather than Porter). Porter was made Professor of comparative physiology. Altogether Cannon would spend four decades on the physiology faculty of the Harvard Medical School, retiring in 1942. His tenure at Harvard was interrupted only by service with the Army Medical Corps during the First World War, when he was stationed in France and England in 1917-1918.

Cannon's growing engagement in physiological research had political, as well as professional implications for him. Following strong antivivisectionist assaults on the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and legislative attempts in New York and elsewhere to curb the use of animals in medical experiments, Cannon joined the struggle against antivivisection. In 1908, in response to these antivivisectionist initiatives, the American Medical Association created a special Defense Committee in Support of Medical Research. Because of his prominence as an experimental physiologist, the thirty-seven year old Cannon was asked to head the committee, placing him in the forefront of the struggle. In this position he would be the A.M.A.'s chief strategist for the next eighteen years. He firmly defended the rights of medical researchers, declaring that "the imagined horrors of medical research do not exist . . . . [Furthermore] that their critics are ignorant—ignorant of the conditions of medical research and ignorant of the complex relations of the medical sciences to medical and surgical practice and . . . that these critics in their ignorance are endeavoring to stop that experimental study of physiology and pathology." Cannon and his retired colleague Philadelphia surgeon William W. Keen (1837-1932, APS 1884) monitored antivivisectionist activity, mobilized the medical profession, lobbied politicians, testified in public hearings, and wrote tirelessly in defense of animal experimentation.

During the first World War, Cannon worked on the treatment of trauma and wound shock. Even before the entry of the United States into the war, in the fall of 1916 the National Research Council recruited him for its Committee on Traumatic Shock. Later he joined the Harvard University Hospital Unit, and on his way to France in May 1917 stopped in London to join the Medical Research Committee, a group of physicians and surgeons from the British Expeditionary Forces, treating shock cases at the Casualty Clearing State at Béthune. The following summer, after the Medical Research Committee formed a Shock Committee, Cannon was named a member. Later, he was appointed director of the surgical research laboratory of the American Expeditionary Forces's Central Medical Department. Although Cannon and his colleagues initially focused their efforts on treating the acidosis that accompanies shock, they soon realized that acidosis was simply a secondary occurrence, the result of inadequate tissue perfusion. Cannon later summarized the conclusions of his wartime experiences in his work on Traumatic Shock (1923).

In the years preceding and immediately following World War I, he devoted much energy to research into the sympathetic nervous system and functions of the suprarenal medulla, such as the secretion of the adrenaline during stress, the "fight or flight" mechanism. The studies he started with M.A. McIver and S.W. Bliss on the sympathetic and adrenal mechanism for mobilizing sugar in hypoglycemia caused by insulin (1923) might have provided the original context for his notion of homeostatis. He coined the term in a 1926 paper titled "Physiological Regulation of Normal States." Canon published an extensive analysis of the problem of homeostatis in 1929. The article, which appeared in Physiological Reviews, discussed the homeostatic regulation of water, sodium chloride balance, glucose, protein, fat and calcium, but also examined the part played by the autonomic nervous system in homeostatis and the homeostatic functions of hunger, thirst, and uniform temperature. Cannon popularized the concept of homeostatis in a 1932 book entitled the Wisdom of the Body.

Beginning in the 1930's Cannon and his colleagues Z.M. Bacq and Arturo Rosenbluth focused their research chemical transmission of nerve impulses. An early synthesis of their work was entitled Autonomic Neuro-Effective Systems (1937), that hypothesized the existence of two "sympathins," one excitatory and one inhibitory. Although it drew critical reviews, the work bore some resemblance to the research e carried out later by Nobel laureates Otto Loewi (1936) and Ulf von Euler (1970).

In addition to his strong commitments to medical education and scientific research, Cannon cherished the deep conviction that as a citizen, a scientist is obligated to defend freedom, which is indispensable for productive scholarship. His beliefs in the family of humankind and the universality of science led to his involvement with the American-Soviet Medical Society and the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China. He was also increasingly concerned about the growing threat that fascist and authoritarian governments posed to the scientific community. After meeting Spanish physiologist Juan Negrin (later premier of the Spanish Republic), Cannon began to follow political developments in Spain very closely. In 1937 he became chair of the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. He also developed a friendship with Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1848-1936, APS 1932), who had similar research interests, but he also had a general (albeit not uncritical) interest in the Soviet Union and it support for science. In all of these international endeavors Cannon was motivated by two concerns: the advancement of science and humanitarian support for the weak and oppressed.

Cannon was active in a number of scholarly and professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physiological Society. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1908. In addition to his research articles and monographs, he was author of a several popular books that found a wide audience. These works included Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915) and The Wisdom of the Body (1932), and his autobiography, The Way of an Investigator: A Scientist's Experiences in Medical Research (1945).

Cannon retired from the Harvard Medical School in 1942. Although he was a visiting professor at the New York University Medical School in 1944 and did research with Arturo Rosenbluth in Mexico City in 1945, Cannon's health was failing. The ill health he had endured for decades and the cancerous condition he developed in later life are probably the result of his experiments with x-rays during the early days of his research. Cannon died in Franklin, New Hampshire on October 1, 1945. He was survived by his wife Cornelia, his son Bradford and daughter Marian.

Throughout his adult life, Cannon steadfastly maintained that science held the key to the betterment of the human condition, and that science was synonymous with "truth" and "knowledge". To Cannon, the sanctity of science should not be curtailed or tarnished by arbitrary limitations or falsehood. Scientists should be afforded maximum freedom in their research. In fact, it is the scientist's duty to maximize his freedom by educating the public and promoting a borderless ethic in scientific discourse. These convictions led Cannon to do battle with the antivivisection movement, to assist Jewish doctors from Nazi-controlled Europe, to bring medical relief to the Spanish Republic and to support the formation of scientific ties with the Soviet Union. Consequently, Cannon viewed his opposition to antivivsection as a fundamentally "moral" proposition. Convinced that animal experimentation was essential to medical progress, he considered antivivisectionists' efforts to throw roadblocks in the way of scientific progress as "immoral," and he fulminated over what he perceived as their use of distortions, fabrications, and mistatements, or their sheer, unadulterated ignorance.

A significant resource for study of the response of the American medical community to antivivsectionist agitation during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Cannon Papers are essentially a long conversation between two of the leading anti-antivivisectionists in America, Walter B. Cannon and William W. Keen. In over 650 letters, mostly quite brief, written between 1905 and 1928, Cannon and Keen engage in a sustained dialogue on the best strategies for defending vivisection to a skeptical public and on the best method for organizing the medical community. The collection is arranged chronologically.

Although the dominant theme of the collection is vivisection, Keen and Cannon were active as physicians and medical educators, and their correspondence inevitably touches on other subjects. At various points, the two discuss surgery, neurology, tuberculosis, typhoid vaccination, the treatment of shock, and evolution, and a number of organizations and individuals are mentioned, including the American Philosophical Society, the Mayo Clinic, American Medical Association, University of Minnesota, the League of Nations, the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Lister, Woodrow Wilson, William H. Taft, Edward W. Bok, and S. Weir Mitchell.

Provenance

Acquired, 1973.

Preferred citation

Cite as: Walter B. Cannon Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Catalogued by Carmen Lee, 2000.

Related material

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has an important collection of correspondence of W. W. Keen regarding vivisection.

The bulk of the papers of Walter B. Cannon are housed in the Rare Books Department of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

Bibliography

Physiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics Note

When Walter B. Cannon was chosen to succeed Henry P. Bowditch in 1906 as head of the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology at Harvard Medical School (the first laboratory of experimental physiology in America), he was already recognized as a leader in the field. A champion of scientific medicine and experimental biology, Cannon's neurophysiological studies on the regulation of the sympathetic nervous system, and his work on endocrine function, often entailed vivisection of animals (mainly cats). This of course was a motivating factor in his active participation in the effort against the anti-vivisection campaign. Originating late in the nineteenth century, the legislative debates concerning vivisection, which continued well into the 1920s, transcended mere emotional issues of cruelty to animals. The opposition to experimental research in physiology threatened the image of the new establishment of scientific medicine, its public support and potential resources. This threat was a motivating force behind Cannon's opposition to the anti-vivisectionists. This collection is complemented by the Cannon correspondence in the papers of Simon Flexner (B F365), Peyton Rous (B R77), and William M. Clark (B C547). These communications reflect Cannon's immense influence on the institutional aspects of the life sciences.

General note

It is never easy to pin down the moment that a "movement" was born and even harder to determine the point at which it expired. American antivivisectionism began to appear only in the aftermath of the fierce debate in the UK that culminated in the act to restrict animal experimentation of 1876. Taking their cue from their British counterparts, a small number of Americans began to voice opposition to animal experimentation, but due to the rarity of animal experimentation in this country before the last quarter of the 19th century, the movement was slow to coalesce.

The first antivivisection bill in America was introduced in New York in 1880, and although it was defeated in the legislature, antivivisectionist pressure was ratecheted up over the next twenty years. At both state and national levels, legislative proposals to regulate vivisection came very close to becoming law, and public opinion swung largely to the antivivisection cause. Devising ever more ingenious strategies, the opponents of animal research kept busy with lecture tours and traveling exhibitions, protests and mass meetings, legislative protests and attempts at stopping medical schools from obtaining pets kept in city pounds. By the outbreak of the First World War, however, the antivivisection movement had passed its peak, and by the end of the 1920s, it was no longer considered by defenders of vivisection to be a serious threat.

One of the keys to the success of the antivivisection movement during its heyday was the network of humane societies and animal protection organizations that provided a structure for airing their perspective. The first such organization in America was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in New York by Henry Bergh in 1866, which, like many SPCAs, was also concerned with child abuse and welfare. Bergh was one of the first -- if not the first -- to challenge animal experimenatation at a time when such practice took place very infrequently in America, and it was he who initiated an antivivisection education program at the ASPCA in 1874, and who instigated the antivivisection bill before the New York legislature in 1880.

These radical beginnings, however, soon faded, and although the humane societies remained opposed to human vivisection, by the turn of the century they shrank from opposing animal research. It has been argued that this was largely due to the humane movement's "overall conservatism" in that period and the fact that it "avoided challenging the assumptions that underlie institutionalized exploitation," including "institutional cruelties in farming, vivisection, and exploited wildlife" (Finsen and Finsen p. 51).

In any event, the onus of antivivsetion activity fell elsewhere. Caroline Earle White, who had helped to organize the Pennsylvania SPCA in 1867 and who had served as President of its Women's Branch for fifty years, formed the American Antivivisection Society in 1877 to coordinate the efforts of the various humane societies across the country and to provide support for regulating animal experimentation. Begun in Philadelphia, the Society was followed by similar groups in Boston (1895), Maryland (1898), Chicago (1903), and New York (1908). Like the humane societies, these groups sought to promote the general welfare of all animals, from transportation of animals, to bullfights and wearing animal fur and skin, but as the humane societies began to shy away from supporting the abolition of vivisection, the AAVS did not. As a result, these two communities took increasingly divergent paths, much to the detriment of the antivivisection movement.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those who challenged the antivivisectionists were members of the medical profession. Among their leaders were William Henry Welch, professor of pathology and dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, who led the fight against federal legislation to restrict animal experimentation in 1896 to 1901. His successor in anti-antivivisectionism was William Williams Keen, head of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School, who presented testimony during the Senate hearings in 1900. In Philadelphia, in addition to Keen, the physiologist Richard Mills Pierce and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania were active in anti-antivivisectionism, and after the establishment of the Rockefeller Institute in 1904, they were joined by Henry James, jr., and Simon Flexner. In 1908, the AMA stepped in to help coordinate the response of the medical community, forming a Council for the Defence of Medical Research, of which Cannon was appointed head.

The most vocal defenders of vivisection often argued against all forms of outside interference in medical education and research. They opposed not only the abolition of the use of animals, but even its regulation, maintaining that any concession on their part would lead to dire consequences for medical science. However, just as the antivivisectionists were not uniformly in favor of total abolition, not all medical researchers were so extreme. There was even a small contingent of antivivisectionist physicians who, like Arthur Leffingwell, commanded a degree of "authority" in the medical community.

If one generality applies to the antivivisectionists, it was that they were predominately female. White, renowned as founder of the AAVS, and a brilliant lecturer, was perhaps the most prominent, but women were the backbone of the movement at the grassroots level as both leaders and participants. Women such as Mary F. Lovell and Diana Belais organized antivivisection societies, provided funding, wrote articles and edited the magazine Zoophilly, sought support from women's organizations, and lectured widely. The movement's leaders were generally drawn from families of good social standing, and many were active in other social reform movements (e.g. temperance movement).

Women shaped the movement from its ideological underpinnings to its rhetoric, strategy, and tactics. They stressed emotional elements such as compassion, affection, and caring for the young and defenseless, traits commonly regarded at the time as distinctly "feminine" and "maternal". They considered themselves responsible for setting children on the correct moral path, which included steering them away from cruelty to animals, and they took advantage of their association with women's groups to spread their antivivisection message.

The principal objection to animal experimentation among antivivisectionists was a moral and ethical one. They argued that it is fundamentally immoral to sacrifice sentient creatures to gain scientific knowledge, but more subtly, that claimed that vivisection decreased the moral sensibility of physicians, and by impairing their sense of compassion, would jeopardize public safety. Whether in the laboratory or slaughterhouse, they contended that cruelty to animals corrupted morality. Their ethical concern therefore extended to and included human subjects, especially orphans and hospital patients. Arguing that it was their particular duty to protect the young from exposure to the cruelty inherent in animal experimentation, they succeeded in securing legislation to prohibit vivisection in elementary and secondary schools.

Of all the proposals to regulate vivisection in the last decades of the 19th century and first quarter of the 20th century, the bils presented to Congress in 1896 and 1900 respectively presented the greatest challenge to the medical community. Representative James McMillan of Michigan introduced a bill in 1896 to regulate vivisection in the District of Columbia, modelled on the British act of 1876. After a public hearing, however, the vote was postponed due to the Spanish American War. A similar proposal was put forward in 1900 by Senator Jacob Gallinger from New Hampshire, who had conducted the Senate hearings in 1896. Antivivisectionists had hoped that by securing restriction at the federal level, it would be easier to bring about changes in local laws. Despite support from the public, academics, religious leaders, Supreme Court justices, and even a number of physicians, however, the bill languished due to intensive last minute political lobbying by Welch and other physicians.

The Gallinger bill served as a wake up call for the medical establishment. Even though the bill was defeated, the experience was sobering. Quick to learn their lesson, physicians realized the need to redouble their efforts to defend animal research, making full use of their political connections to push their agenda. Provivisection activists were quick to urge the Council for the Defence of Medical Research to be aggressive in the political sphere, as wellas they public sphere, and they closed ranks around their common cause. Even though Welch and Keen did not agree on everything, leading defenders of animal research always made sure to keep their disputes private and their community in excellent order.

Ultimately, the decline of the antivivisection movement can be traced to several causes beyond the effective response of the medical community. For quite some time it has been maintained that the discovery of diphtheria antitoxin and other major medical developments brought the antivivisectionists to their knees, and that the outbreak of war in 1914 altered moral priorities. Soldiers had to be vaccinated against typhoid and urgent questions about illnesses affecting the troops tempted medical researchers to turn increasingly to laboratory animals for answers. Antivivisection advocates uniformly opposed these activities, and as a result lost support among the general public. More generally, antivivisectionists were not helped by their tendency to misrepresentation and exaggeration, and their use of inaccurate, vague and outdated references. Although antivivisectionists continued to press for legislative changes into the 1920s, they were so thoroughly unsucessful that the many members of the medical community felt confident in declaring victory. Where Cannon had contributed twelve pieces against antivivisection between 1921 and 1926, he wrote only a single article on the subject in the 1930s.

• American Medical Association
• League of Nations.
• University of Minnesota.
• University of Pennsylvania.

• Scientific Correspondence

• Bok, Edward William, 1863-1930
• Cannon, Walter B. (Walter Bradford), 1871-1945
• Keen, William W. (William Williams)
• Lister, Joseph, Baron, 1827-1912
• Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir), 1829-1914
• Taft, William H. (William Howa
• Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924

• Evolution
• Medicine-United States
• Neurology-United States
• Science and technology
• Shock.
• Surgery-United States
• Tuberculosis
• Typhoid vaccine
• Vivisection