“If anatomy served to supply his intellectual appetite for exact and minute knowledge in the shape of concrete facts, physiology served to awaken in his mind the desire to solve problems by a direct experimental appeal to nature.” 

M Foster, (1899) ‘The Masters of Medicine, Claude Bernard’

From the 1560s, physiology was defined as the “study and description of natural objects, natural philosophy”.  From the Greek term ‘physios’, it quite literally means ‘nature’.  Physiology is about how organisms live and adapt to their environment.  Physiology is about the milieu interior requiring an integrated control system to adapt to changes from it.  As Claude Bernard defined the concept in 1865, “disrupting of homeostasis is the basis for disease and death”.

In this blog, physiology will be presented in a comparative approach by assessing how different animals have collectively solved the problems of living in their environment.  Obviously, if evolution had not arrived at a solution, the problems would no longer exist, and discovering the solution is, as the famous comparative physiologist Knut Schmidt-Neilsen said, ‘the study of the living organism is what physiology is all about’.

Physiology, though, is more than a simple discussion of comparison.  We must ask the how and why with just enough physics and chemistry to make logical sense of the observations.  We will explore, for example, how a giraffe 5+ meters tall with a heart approximately two meters below its head regulates blood pressure to the brain, let alone put its head down to drink.  To understand physiology, we must take a comparative approach, attend to the constraints of the environment and try to understand how these constraints are integrated in a homeostatic animal.  

This place is intended for those who wish to read further into some of the more wonderfully strange and bizarre ways comparative physiology was discovered and a little foray into the evolution of intellectual thought.

Peace, Curt Anderson