Background
Henry Gray Barbour was born on March 28, 1886, in Connecticut, John Humphrey Barbour and Ellen Watkinson Gray.
the Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, United States
Barbour graduated with the Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College, Hartford in 1906. On the photo is the Trinity College in 1909, showing the Long Walk and three attached buildings: Northam (center), Jarvis (right), Seabury (left).
the Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, United States
Barbour graduated with the Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College, Hartford in 1906. On the photo is the Trinity College in 1909, showing the Long Walk and three attached buildings: Northam (center), Jarvis (right), Seabury (left).
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Barbour received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1910.
Pharmacologist physiologist scientist Toxicologist
Henry Gray Barbour was born on March 28, 1886, in Connecticut, John Humphrey Barbour and Ellen Watkinson Gray.
Barbour graduated with the Bachelor of Arts degree from Trinity College, Hartford in 1906. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1910.
After a year at Johns Hopkins as a fellow in pathology, Henry G. Barbour traveled abroad (1911–1912), visiting research laboratories in Freiburg, Vienna, and London. Following his return to the United States he taught pharmacology at Yale University (1912–1921), McGill University (1921–1923), and the University of Louisville (1923–1931). In 1931 he returned to Yale, first as associate professor and in 1940 as research associate in pharmacology.
In 1885, twenty years after the appearance of Claude Bernard’s concept of the physiologically constant milieu intérieur, E. Aronsohn and J. Sachs had disclosed the existence of a region in the corpus striatum of the brain concerned with the regulation of one of the most important factors in internal constancy, body temperature. A puncture of the nervous tissue in this region was shown to produce a characteristic fever. R. Kahn’s experiments in 1904 on the heating of the blood in the carotid artery showed that the brain reacted to the increased heat of this blood with such cooling responses as peripheral vasodilation and increased perspiration.
In 1912 Barbour set out to test the effect of heat and cold applied directly to this temperature-responsive region of the brain. He punctured the brains of rabbits and inserted in each a tube through which water at different temperatures could be passed. The puncture itself induced a fever, but when water heated 46°C. –49°C. was passed through the tube, body temperature dropped sharply, almost 1. 5 degrees C. in one hour. When cold water was passed through the tube, body temperature rose sharply.
Through observations of the veins in the ear of the rabbit, Barbour was able to correlate vasomotor reactions with the temperature of the water in the experiment. He reported a striking alteration in the ear’s appearance: within two minutes after the start of hot water flow, the veins had dilated and filled with blood, and the entire ear felt warm. Cold stimulation of the temperature center produced opposite effects. The heat center of the brain therefore reacted to extreme temperatures by activating countervailing physiological mechanisms that brought the blood temperature hack to normal.
From 1912 until well into the 1940’s Barhour contributed to the amassing of more precise information on the phenomena of temperature regulation, and he became a leading authority on the mechanism of body temperature regulation and the effect of pyretic and antipyretic drugs. His primary contribution to this field was contained in his 1912 paper. After 1931, Barbour’s work benefited from the added stimulus of Walter B. Cannon’s ideas on the physiological elements contributing to homeostasis.
In a 1940 paper expanding on the work of Keller and Hare and others, Barbour showed, through the use of localized lesions to remove functions selectively, that there are two temperature control centers: a heat loss center in the anterior hypothalamus and a heating center in the posterior hypothalamus. In both cat and monkey brains, lesions of the anterior hypothalamus produced abnormally high body temperatures, while lesions of the posterior hypothalamus or the nervous paths related to that region resulted in greatly lowered temperatures. In the same series of experiments, control of water-shifting mechanisms, and therefore of the concentration of the bodily fluids, was found to be associated with the anterior hypothalamic region.
Henry Gray Barbour married Lilla Chittenden and had 3 children.
Doctor of Medicine