Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist, whose pioneering work with his collaborator, Herbert Spencer Gasser, helped to advance the field of neurophysiology.
Background
Erlanger was born on January 5, 1874, in San Francisco, California. His father, Herman Erlanger, had immigrated to the United States in 1842 at the age of sixteen from his home in Wurtemberg, in Southern Germany. After struggling as a peddler in the Mississippi Valley, he went to California during the Gold Rush. Unsuccessful at mining, Erlanger turned to business and became a moderately successful merchant. In 1849, he married Sarah Galinger, also an immigrant from Southern Germany and the sister of his business partner. Joseph was the sixth of seven children, five sons, and two daughters. From an early age, Erlanger showed an interest in the natural world, a fact that led his older sister to give him the nickname “Doc.”
Education
Erlanger entered the classical Latin curriculum at the San Francisco Boys’ High School in 1889. After graduating in 1891, he began studies in the College of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1895. It was at Berkeley that Erlanger performed his first research—studying the development of new eggs. He then enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and earned a medical degree in 1899, fulfilling his childhood aspirations of becoming a doctor. Erlanger excelled as a student while at Johns Hopkins, graduating second in his class. He also received honorary degrees from universities of California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins University, Washington University, and the Free University of Brussels.
This distinction allowed him to work as an intern in internal medicine for William Osier, the renowned physician and teacher.
After arriving in Baltimore, Erlanger decided that medical research and not medical practice would be his life’s pursuit. In the summer of 1896, he worked in the histology laboratory of Lewellys Barker, demonstrating his zeal for research by studying the location of horn cells in the spinal cord of rabbits. The following summer, he undertook a different project determining how much of a dog’s small intestine could be surgically removed without interfering with its digestive processes. This study led to Erlanger’s first published paper in 1901, and to his appointment as assistant professor of physiology at Johns Hopkins by William H. Howell, one of America’s most important physiologists and head of the department. He was later promoted to associate professor of physiology.
His career was exceptional for two reasons. Unlike the generation of scientists that preceded him, Erlanger did not migrate to Europe to study. This decision reflected the improving standards of medical education and scientific research in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century. Second, Erlanger, although he was a trained physician, chose to pursue a full-time career to research instead of medical practice. Physician- scientists before Erlanger could devote only part of their time to research, as the rest was spent on patient care.
During his career at Johns Hopkins, Erlanger studied a number of problems that were important in meditóme. In 1904, he designed and constructed a sphygmomanometer, a device that measures blood pressure.
Erlanger improved on previous designs by making it sturdier and easier to use. Later that year, he used the device to find a correlation between blood pressure and orthostatic albuminuria, where in proteins appear in the urine when a patient stands. His last few years at Johns Hopkins were spent studying electrical conduction in the heart, particularly the activity between the auricles and the ventricles that is responsible for the consistent beating of the heart. Using a clamp of his own design, he was able to determine that a conduction blockage, or heart block, in the bundle of His, a connection between the auricles and ventricles, was responsible for the reduced pulse and fainting spells associated with Stokes-Adams syndrome.
In 1906, Erlanger left Johns Hopkins and moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he became the first professor of physiology at the university’s medical school. Though the university’s administration recruited Erlanger to build and equip a physiological laboratory, his efforts were continually hampered by a lack of funds. This situation contributed to his decision to leave Wisconsin in 1910 for the Washington University School of Medicine, in Saint Louis. The medical school at Washington had been newly reorganized and had sufficient funds to meet Erlanger’s needs. He worked at Washington for the remainder of his career, serving as professor of physiology and department chairman.
Even after his retirement in 1946, Erlanger continued to work part-time performing research and helping graduate students in their work.
After arriving at Washington University, Erlanger devoted much of his time and energy to the formidable task of helping to reorganize the medical school. Erlanger and the other department heads constituted the new school’s executive faculty which oversaw administration and offered significant input into the construction and design of the new medical school buildings. In 1917, the United States’ entry into World War I drew Erlanger’s attention away from his administrative duties, presenting him with the opportunity to return to the laboratory and to his research on cardiovascular physiology. He participated with other physiologists in the study of wound shock and helped to develop therapeutic solutions that were used by the United States Army in Europe. He also continued the work that he had begun at Johns Hopkins, studying the sounds of Korotkoff, the sound one hears in an artery when measuring blood pressure with a stethoscope.
Although Erlanger would remain interested in cardio-vascular physiology throughout his career, he experienced an intellectual transition in the early 1920s, when he took up questions of neurophysiology. The arrival at Washington University of Herbert Spencer Gasser, a student of Erlanger’s from Wisconsin and a fellow Johns Hopkins graduate, spurred this change. Erlanger and Gasser would collaborate at Washington University until Gasser’s departure in 1931 for the Cornell Medical College. Understanding how nerves transmit electrical impulses preoccupied Erlanger and Gasser during the 1920s. The difficulty in studying nerves was that the electrical impulses were too weak and too brief to measure them accurately.
In 1921 Erlanger and Gasser, based on advances made at the Western Electric Company, constructed a cathode-ray oscilloscope that could record the nerve impulse. The cathode-ray oscilloscope with amplifier was a technological breakthrough that permitted neurophysiologists to overcome the barrier posed by the subtlety and brevity of nerve activity. Erlanger and Gasser went on to study the details of nerve transmission. Their most significant contribution derived from these researches was their conclusion that larger nerve fibers conducted electrical impulses faster than smaller ones. Also, they demonstrated that different nerve fibers can have different functions.
Achievements
Joseph Erlanger made fundamental discoveries about the way in which nerve impulses are conducted. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.
The Joseph Erlanger House in St. Louis was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 8, 1976 as a building of national significance. On January 22, 2009, the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon after him.
For his scientific efforts, Erlanger was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Physiological Society.
Personality
Erlanger was reserved, quiet, and introverted; she was effusive, active, and extroverted. His love of walking, camping, and the outdoors stayed with him throughout Erlanger’s lengthy professional career.
Interests
His only hobby, he said, was "communion with nature. " He combined a reflective mind with great manual dexterity, which made him a gifted experimentalist.
Connections
On June 21, 1906, Erlanger married Aimee Hirstel, a fellow San Franciscan. Their marriage of more than fifty years was a strong and vibrant one, and produced three children, Margaret, Ruth Josephine, and Herman.
