Background
Frederick Haven Pratt was born on July 19, 1873, in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Frederick Sumner Pratt, a merchant descended from early Massachusetts settlers and Sarah McKean Hilliard.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Pratt entered Harvard after attending preparatory school in his native Worcester, receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1896 and the Master of Arts in 1898.
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Pratt studied at the University of Göttingen before getting his Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Pratt graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1906 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine.
Massachusetts Medical Society, Waltham, Massachusetts, United States
Pratt was a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS).
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States
Pratt was a member of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS).
educator physiologist scientist author
Frederick Haven Pratt was born on July 19, 1873, in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Frederick Sumner Pratt, a merchant descended from early Massachusetts settlers and Sarah McKean Hilliard.
Pratt entered Harvard after attending preparatory school in his native Worcester, receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1896 and the Master of Arts in 1898. After that, he studied at the University of Göttingen and then graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1906 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine.
After studying at the University of Göttingen and a stay at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he became assistant in physiology at Harvard in 1901. After his graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1906, he taught physiology in Wellesley College’s department of hygiene until 1912, when he was appointed a professor of physiology at the University of Buffalo.
The first of Pratt’s researches into skeletal muscle fiber contraction applying the “all-or-none“principle was published while he was head of the department of physiology in the medical school at Buffalo. From 1919 to 1920 he was an honorary fellow in biology at Clark University, and the next year he served as a teaching fellow in physiology at Harvard. Named professor of physiology at Boston University in 1921, he remained there until he retired emeritus in 1942. Later he headed a firm supplying apparatus for physiological research. A member of the American Physiological Society and other scientific societies, he was interested in the work of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Bermuda Biology Station. He wrote several biographical studies and was especially intrigued by the biological concepts of Emanuel Swedenborg, finding them in many ways modern and in some respects anticipatory of certain of his own regarding cardiac nutrition.
The gradation of muscle activity had engaged investigators before Pratt, with his undergraduate assistant John P. Eisenberger, set out to devise a method of determining by direct observation the response of single muscle fibers to stimuli. After Henry Pickering Bowditch in 1871, studying cardiac muscle had set forth the “all-or-none” principle, others had explored the further applicability of the rule that independent of its strength, a stimulus, if it elicited a response, evoked one that was maximal. Francis Gotch had studied nerve fibers; Keith Lucas had maintained that the contraction of individual skeletal muscle fibers in response to stimuli was an all-or-none phenomenon.
In 1917 Pratt published his description of a method of stimulating a single muscle fiber, or a few at most. He utilized a capillary pore electrode having a pore of 8µ, smaller in diameter than the contractile element (a single muscle fiber of the sartorius of the frog), but noted that still smaller pores had been made. The technique provided for direct microscopic observation and for photomicrographic tracings. Also in 1917 Pratt reported studies in which the movements of a mercury globule lying on the surface of a muscle preparation were recorded, and he followed fatigue and staircase gradients as well as graded responses.
His medical training enabled Pratt to combine a keen interest in the theoretical aspects of physiological research, which he examined in relation to their historical antecedents, with an expertise in the use of apparatus in experimentation.
Pratt saw the problem of muscle contraction as essentially one of energy transformations and of the changes involved between stimulus and response. He demonstrated discontinuities in muscle fiber response that were interpreted as a direct confirmation of the all-or-none effect; thus the graded response of skeletal muscle was explained as a summation of maximal individual fiber contractions. He drew an analogy with quantum hypotheses in describing the all-or-none response in muscle fibers.
Frederick Pratt was a member of the following organizations: Massachusetts Medical Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences, American Physiological Society, Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine, American Antiquarian Society.
Pratt married Margery Wilerd Davis on June 12, 1912. They had five children from this marriage: Frederick Sumner, Margery Willard (Mistress James C. Koren), Roger Conant, Elisabeth Haven (Mistress George Cheely), Stephen Davis.