Bastian, Henry Charlton

Bastian, Henry Charlton

(b. Truro, England, 26 April 1837; d. Chesham Bois, England, 17 November 1915)

neurology, bacteriology.

Little is known of Bastian’s early life except that his father was named James and that the boy showed great interest in natural history. In 1856 he entered University College London, and seven years later was graduated M.B. At first he worked at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, as assistant physician and lecturer on pathology, but returned to his alma mater in 1867 as professor of pathological anatomy, having received the M.D. a year before. He continued to practice clinical medicine, and in 1878 was promoted to physician to University College Hospital. From 1887 to 1898 Bastian held the chair of the principles and practice of medicine and also had an appointment at the National Hospital in Queen Square, London, from 1868 to 1902. Early in his career he worked on the problem of abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation, and the return of this interest determined his premature retirement from clinical neurology.

Bastian married Julia Orme in 1866, and had three sons and a daughter. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1868, at the age of thirty-one; served as a censor of the Royal College of Physicians of London from 1897 to 1898; and received honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and an honorary M.D. from the Royal University of Ireland. From 1884 to 1898 Bastian was crown referee in cases of supposed insanity, and a few months before he died, he was awarded a Civil List pension of £150 a year in recognition of his services to science. He is said to have been a close friend of Herbert Spencer, but the philosopher makes only very slight reference to Bastian in his lengthy autobiography. As one of Spencer’s executors, Bastian helped to publish the latter work.

Bastian’s earliest scientific work was with guinea worms and other nematodes, but his investigations ended suddenly when he developed a strange allergy to these creatures. His clear analytical mind, sound reasoning, and acute powers of observation drew him to clinical neurology, and he spent the rest of his hospital and academic life in this discipline. Beginning in 1869, he published a series of papers on speech disorders. At a time when it was thought that speech was controlled by independent brain centers, Bastian was the most important of those who represented this view by means of diagrams almost akin to electrical circuits. He described a visual and an auditory word center, and in 1869 he gave the first account of word blindness (alexia) and of word deafness, which is known today as “Wernicke’s aphasia.” His views on aphasia, which were founded on an assumption that there is a direct relationship between psychological functions and localized areas of brain, were an oversimplification and are no longer accepted. They are presented, with supporting clinical data, in A Treatise on Aphasia and Other Speech Defects (1898).

The many publications on clinical and clinicopathological neurology prepared by Bastian reveal his outstanding practical, philosophical, and literary skills, which he exercised to the full in a specialty of medicine that was then emerging as a more precise science. Nevertheless, his work was overshadowed by that of some of his contemporaries who excelled him. His book. The Brain as an Organ of Mind (1880) and those on paralyses (1875, 1886, 1893), although important, were less popular than those of other writers; and the claim that he and his contemporaries John Hughlings Jackson and William Gowers founded neurological science in Britain is difficult to justify. Nevertheless, he was an important pioneer of neurology as a science; in addition, his anatomical skill is revealed by the discovery in 1867¹ of the anterior spinocerebellar tract of the spinal cord—now known, however, as “Gowers’ tract” because of the more detailed investigation of it made by Gowers in 1880. In 1887 Bastian published his important paper on “muscular sense,” which he thought was represented in the cerebral cortex, whereas, in contrast with Ferrier and Beevor, in particular, he considered the cortical motor centers to be unnecessary. In 1890 he showed for the first time that complete section of the upper spinal cord abolishes reflexes and muscular tone below the level of the lesion; this has been known occasionally as Bastian’s law.

Bastian himself claimed that his studies on abiogenesis were more significant; and there were two periods of activity in this field, approximately 1868–1878 and 1900–1915. Contrary to accepted biological and bacteriological opinion, he believed that there was no strict boundary between organic and inorganic life. He denied the doctrine of omne vivum ex ovo and argued that since living matter must have arisen from nonliving matter at an early stage in evolution, such a process could still be taking place. His battle was fought mostly alone; and eventually he was the last scientific opponent of Pasteur, Tyndall, Koch, and the other pioneers of bacteriology. This was an important role, for he pointed out many of their mistakes; and thus, in a negative way and quite against his purpose, he helped to advance the germ theory of fermentation and of disease. As Pasteur’s main opponent, he was responsible for the development of some of the techniques that advanced bacteriology.

Thus, Bastian denied that boiling destroyed all bacteria, as Pasteur claimed, and thereby opened the way for the discovery of heat-resistant spores. On the whole, his criticisms of Pasteur’s logic were more effective than the multitude of experiments he cunningly conceived and carried out, for the techniques he used are now known to have been frequently defective. His views and supporting experimental data were set forth in a large book of over 1,100 pages, The Beginnings of Life (1872). Concerning the role of bacteria in fermentation, he concluded that “These lowest organisms are, in fact, to be regarded as occasional concomitant products rather than invariable or necessary causes of all fermentative changes.”² A controversy with Tyndall concerning the existence of airborne germs closed his first period of interest in bacteriology. His opponent’s comments summarize the situation in 1878: “Neither honour to the individual nor usefulness to the public is likely to accrue from its [the controversy’s] continuance, and life is too serious to be spent in hunting down in detail the Protean errors of Dr. Bastian.”³ He began again to devote all his time to his neurological practice and writings.

Bastian returned to his biological studies in 1900 and devoted the last fifteen years of his life to the fundamental problem of the origin of life. He was the last scientific believer in spontaneous generation, for he succeeded in converting no one to his cause. He had been self-instructed in the field of biological research, and although he learned such recording procedures as photomicrography, he was eventually left behind as the technology of the new science of microbiology developed apace, mainly in the hands of the French and German pioneers. Bastian thought that abiogenesis included “archebiosis,” living things arising from inorganic matter, or from dead animal or plant tissues, through new molecular combinations, and “heterogenesis,” the interchangeability of the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, both among themselves and with each other; thus ciliates and flagellae could arise from amoebae.

In this regard Bastian was criticized by biologists who accused him of insufficient knowledge of lower forms of life. He attempted to substantiate these phenomena in Studies in Heterogenesis (1904), illustrated by 815 photomicrographs, and in The Nature and Origin of Living Matter (1905). Each contains similar arguments, in which he compares the unit of living matter with crystals and suggests that the persistence of lower organisms can be adequately ascribed to their successive evolution. Bastian made solutions containing colloidal silica and iron, and put them in sealed glass tubes that were heat-sterilized and stored under regulated conditions of light and temperature. His claim was that after a time, such organisms as bacteria, torulae, and molds grew, but no one could or would repeat these observations. The Evolution of Life (1907) dealt exclusively with archebiosis. Many of his papers were rejected by the Royal Society of London and by other learned bodies; this was the case with the material of his last book, The Origin of Life (1911). Two years later The Lancet summarized the scientists’ judgment of this losing battle: “To our mind the position is quite unchanged, and we ourselves still remain unconvinced, save, of course, of the courage and good faith of Dr. Bastian.”⁴

After Bastian’s death his son challenged bacteriologists and others to disprove his father’s work on abiogenesis. The correspondence thus stimulated⁵ reveals that several investigators thought they had done so, but certain findings are still unexplained. Careful repetition of crucial experiments and a dialectical analysis of his results are still needed. Of Bastian’s industry, tenacity, logic, and experimental versatility—although perhaps misplaced—there can be no question.

NOTES

1. “On a Case of Concussion-Lesion...,” in Medical-Chirurgical Transactions, 2nd ser., 32 (1867), 499–537.

2. Modes of Origin, p. 108.

3. “Spontaneous Generation. A Last Word,” in Nineteenth Century, 3 (1878), 497–508, see 508.

4. The Lancet (1913). i . 970.

5. ibid. (1919), i , 951–952, 1000–1001, 1044–1045, 1133–1134; ii , 216–217, 458.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bastian’s writings include The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms (London, 1871); The Beginnings of Life, 2 vols. (London, 1872); On Paralysis From Brain Disease in Its Common Forms (London, 1875); The Brain as an Organ of Mind (London, 1880), also trans. into French and German; Paralyses, Cerebral, Bulbar and Spinal (London, 1886); “The ‘Muscular Sense’; Its Nature and Cortical Localisation,” in Brain, 10 (1888), 1–137; Various Forms of Hysterical or Functional Paralysis (London, 1893); A Treatise on Aphasia and Other Speech Defects (London, 1898), also trans. into German and Italian; Studies in Heterogenesis (pub. in 4 pts., London, 1901–1903; pub, together, 1904); The Nature and Origin of Living Matter (London, 1905; rev. and abbr. ed., 1909); The Evolution of Life (London, 1907), also trans. into French; and The Origin of Life (London, 1911, 1913). There is a complete list of Bastian’s writings in an unpublished biography by Mercer Rang, “The Life and Work of Henry Charlton Bastian 1837–1915” (1954), MS in Library of University College Hospital Medical School, London.

II. Secondary Literature. There is no published work comparable with the Rang MS. Obituaries are British Medical Journal (1915), 2 , 795–796; The Lancet (1915), 2 , 1220–1224 (including portrait and brief bibliography); and F. W. M[ott], in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 89 (1917), xxi–xxiv. See also J. K. Crellin, “The Problem of Heat Resistance of Micro-organisms in the British Spontaneous Generation Controversies of 1860–1880,” in Medical History, 10 (1966), 50–59; Lothar B. Kalinowsky, “Henry Charlton Bastian,” in Webb Haymaker, ed., The Founders of Neurology (Springfield, Ill., 1953), pp. 241–244; and Mercer Rang, “Henry Charlton Bastian (1837–1915),” in University College Hospital Magazine, 39 (1954), 68–73.

Edwin Clarke