Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer, 1850-1935

Abstract

With the death of Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer, on March 29, 1935, in his eighty-fifth year, there passed away a very distinguished physiologist, and one whose name was known to the general public, since his method of giving artificial respiration, in the prone position, became adopted by all who have to do with ambulance work, and teachers of the means of saving life from drowning, electric shock, and asphyxiation. Born in 1850, the son of J. W. Schafer of Highgate and of Hamburg, then a free city, he was educated at Clewer House School, Windsor, and then at University College, London, joining the medical school attached to University College Hospital. There he became marked out as showing exceptional promise by awards of scholarships, at London University, in zoology, and in anatomy and physiology. He gained the medal for Physiology at University College, and in 1871, on the foundation of the Sharpey Scholarship, was elected to the post, which carried teaching duties with it. At the time when Schafer became a medical student, England was far behind France and Germany in Physiological Science. There was no pure physiologist and no physician fully competent to teach the subject. There were no men like Magendie, Bernard, Muller, Helmholtz, Ludwig. But Schafer’s teacher, William Sharpey, although an anatomist by training, was interested in living functions and studied the action of cilia, and microscopic changes in living cells, together with the minute structure of tissues. He filled the Chair of General Anatomy and Physiology, founded in 1836, but there was at his use no laboratory, and he showed no experiments on muscle and nerve, beyond those demonstrated by Galvani fifty years earlier. There was no kymograph, but Sharpey revolved “his dear old hat,” as Michael Foster said, to show the working of one.