Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

'Though the phenomenon in which nerves disintegrated following the introduction of a lesion to them had been described by Augustus Volney Waller as early as 1850, it was only during the 1870s and 1880s - when Sherrington was a student at Cambridge - that 'degeneration' studies began to be taken up by British physiologists in any systematic manner (Lawrence 2009, 456-457, 464-466).'

 

Relevant passages from Lawrence:

 

'''In 1850, a British physician, Augustus Volney Waller, published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the object of which, he said, ‘is to describe certain alterations which take place in the elementary fibres of the nerve after they have been removed from their connection with the brain or spinal marrow’. Waller had received an MD from Paris in 1840, carried out research in Bonn, practised medicine in London and was one of that small cohort of English practitioners promoting the introduction of German science into British medicine. In his paper Waller reported that he had experimentally severed the hypoglossal and glossopharyngeal nerves of frogs and examined the remnants microscopically. He noted that while the proximal portion of the nerves remained normal, the distal portions underwent change. They were ‘disorganized’, showed a ‘kind of coagulation’, and were ‘disjointed’. [note: 'Augustus Volney Waller, ‘Experiments on the Section of the Glossopharyngeal and Hypoglossal Nerves of the Frog, and Observations on the Alterations Produced thereby in the Structure of their Primitive Fibres’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 140 (1850), 423-29, 425, 426.'] This description is now regarded as ‘classic’, and the change in the nerve after section is called ‘Wallerian degeneration’.' (456-457)

 

'Towards the end of the nineteenth century the degenerating nerve was investigated and redefined in the physiology laboratory notably by the use of electrophysiological theory and technology. By this time most of the more exotic cosmological languages used fifty years earlier to connect life and electricity had disappeared from the language of orthodox medicine. [note: 'Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ, 1998).'] As Anson Rabinbach has shown too, by this period metaphors of the motor and the sciences of energy figured large in the understanding of life. [note: 'Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992).'] But if flagrant assertions of the identity of life and electricity were no longer appropriate, in much deeper ways - notably in the research and pedagogy of laboratory science - electricity had become deeply embedded in the investigation of living things. In the science of everyday physiology, studies of nervous transmission in experimental animals were made concrete in the electrical apparatus of the physiology laboratory. In Shäffer’s textbook nerve phenomena were categorized under the headings of ‘excitability’, ‘conductivity’ and the ‘state of excitation’. Excitability was ‘preeminently the attribute of nervous tissue’ and it was manifested as a nervous response and the ‘direct index of a nerve response is the electrical change, which is the sole physical alteration at present ascertained in active nerve’. [Francis Gotch, ‘Nerve’ in Schäffer, Text-Book, 451, 459. It is noteworthy though, in spite of the supremacy of the nervous system, how the activities of other systems of the body were being transformed into electrical signals, for instance, those of the heart into the electrocardiogram.'] Life, in a physiological sense, was manifested in the laboratory by instrumentation, the bulk of which was electrical. Since, by this time, the nervous system was regarded as the fundamental biological organ of vertebrates - the one that allowed them to adapt to and evolve in the world - measuring electrical change in the nervous system was a way of investigating the deepest processes of life. [note: 'Robert M. Young , Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York, 1990).'] It was about this time too that Waller’s name began to be added to accounts of nerve degeneration.

One of the principle British workers whose studies centred on electrophysiology was Augustus Désire Waller, born 1856, the son of Augustus Volney Waller. [note: 'Augustus Désire´ Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.'] The younger Waller spent most of his working life as full-time lecturer in physiology at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and then as Professor in the University of London. Waller’s textbook, An Introduction to Human Physiology appeared in 1891 and was dedicated to his father. The dedication page listed a number of his father’s achievements, the first of which was ‘Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nerve, 1850’. Although the older Waller’s name had already been appended to degeneration, the son’s work seems to have been significant in further promoting the connection (see below). In his book the younger Waller described ‘The consequences of nerve-section’ including ‘paralysis of motion or of sensation or of both’. ‘Wallerian degeneration’, he observed, could be seen histologically. It was coarse and ‘easily recognized’. He also described ‘The reaction of degeneration’. This, he said, was ‘a term used to denote the reaction of diseased nerve and muscle [to electrical stimulation] on man’. In the nerve the reaction consisted in ‘an abolition of excitability to the constant current and to the induced current’ and inmuscle ‘the abolition of excitability to the induced currentwhile the excitability to the constant current is exaggerated’. Waller not only described degeneration in a single nerve under experimental conditions but also degeneration of the large ascending and descending tracts of the spinal cord, either in cases of lesions of the hemispheres or spinal accidents in man or after section of the cord in animals. [note: 'Augustus Désire´ Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.']

By the time of the younger Waller’s work, his father’s name had already been appended to degeneration and the ‘reaction of degeneration’ was being elicited in the clinic as a diagnostic sign. In 1887, in his book on Diseases of the Brain, a London physician, C.W. Suckling, noted that ‘Waller many years ago showed the nerve fibres severed from their nerve cells... undergo degeneration’. This appeared in the index as ‘Wallerian nerve degeneration’. The work also had a chapter ‘The Use of Electricity in Diagnosis’ which described the response of normal muscle paralysed by nerve injury. ‘The diminution or loss of Faradic irritability... in a muscle’, the author wrote, ‘indicates... degeneration of its nerve’. In diseases affecting the nerve cell nucleus or nerve trunk, quantitative and qualitative changes in the electrical response constituted the ‘reaction of degeneration’. [note: 'C.W. Suckling, On the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain, Spinal Cord and Nerves (London, 1887), 17, 142.']

Wallerian degeneration and the reaction of degeneration were probably given wide currency following William Osler’s use of them in his The Principles and Practice of Medicine of 1892. This text became famous as Osler himself became, probably, the most esteemed physician of his generation. His book was widely used and often republished and reprinted. Discussing the cerebral cortex and ‘Lesions of the Motor System’, Osler gave an account of nerve fibres becoming ‘detached from their ganglion cells’. The result of this, he recorded, was ‘secondary degeneration or Wallerian degeneration, after the physician who first described it’. Such lesions, he noted, led to clinical paralysis or abnormal muscular contractions. Under the heading ‘Multiple Neuritis’, Osler reported electrical studies of ‘the reaction of degeneration’ in which ‘the contraction of the muscle when stimulated with the positive [electrical] pole is greater than when stimulated with the negative pole’. An abnormal reaction might be caused by diseases such fever, alcoholic and arsenical polyneuritis and beri-beri. Osler made no explicit link between the pathology of degeneration that he described and degenerative diseases in a racial or evolutionary sense. He did, however, postulate hereditary links between mild neurological diseases caused by degenerated nerves in one generation and other more severe disorders appearing in subsequent ones. Epilepsy, often described as a typical disease or symptom of degeneracy, he considered had an inherited dimension. He noted that ‘the children of neurotic families in which neuralgia, insanity, and hysteria prevail are more liable to fall victim to the disease’. Alcoholism or syphilis (both were frequently stipulated to be the cause or result of degeneracy) in the parents could also play a part. The influence of masturbation (said by many to be another sign and cause of degeneracy), Osler considered, had been ‘probably overrated’. [note: 'William Osler, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1892), 89293, 780, 94950. On the reaction of degeneration, Osler cites Allen Starr, ‘Lectures on Neuritis’, Medical Record (New York, 1887).'] Thus, although Osler did not marshal the whole degeneracy ideology and spell out its dire conclusions for the future of the race or nation his text did assume a relation between morbid change in the nerves (pathological and physiological degeneration), deviance, nerve poisons (notably alcohol) and heredity.

By the mid 1890s, then, the disorganization of a nerve or a nervous column following a lesion was commonly called a ‘secondary degeneration’. What seems to have occurred here was not a more precise agreement on what constituted pathological degeneration (as opposed to the physiological reaction of degeneration) because of more detailed description (although this was occurring) but the achievement of a consensus to call a degeneration what was previously variously called a disintegration, dissolution, coagulation and so on. Secondary degeneration was a large taxonomic category covering peripheral nerves and spinal tracts and had a vast array of causes: embolic, haemorrhagic, tumours, poisons etc. That is, pathological nervous degeneration was not only found in the clinical diseases characterized by social or moral inadequacy - psychiatric disorders, syphilis, alcoholism, etc.- but in many disorganizations of action following an insult to the nervous system. Alcohol and alcoholism in particular reveal the difficulties of making generalizations about ideas of the causes and effects of degeneration. Alcohol was often invoked as a poison capable of causing degeneration of the nerve, and in turn setting in motion the degeneration of a family. Contrariwise alcoholism could be a late hereditary manifestation of degeneration initiated by some other agent acting on the sufferer’s forebears.' (464-466)