Bell, Charles

WORKS BY BELL

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles Bell, physiologist and anatomist, was one of the founders of the field now called physiological psychology. He was born in Edinburgh in 1774, the son of the Reverend William Bell, and died in Worcestershire on a journey to London in 1842.

Bell studied anatomy and surgery with his elder and already famous brother John. He also studied painting and drawing and became well-known for his anatomical illustrations—and, indeed, for his paintings. While still in his twenties he published studies on anatomy and was established as a brilliant lecturer and demonstrator in anatomy as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

At the age of 30, he moved to London, where he soon became director of the famous Hunterian School of Medicine. At the formation of London University this school was discontinued and Bell accepted the chair of physiology in the new institution. At length, in the hope of securing more time for research, he returned to Edinburgh to accept the chair of surgery there. During his London period Bell was knighted by George iv and given the honorary degree of m.d. by the University of Göttingen.

Bell’s greatest contribution to knowledge was his discovery of the structural and functional discreteness of the motor and sensory nerves.

The modern physiological psychologist so clearly recognizes that the response mechanism involves receptors, sensory nerves, the central nervous system, motor nerves, and effectors that he finds it hard to remember how recent this knowledge is. Galen, Descartes, Swammerdam, Thomas Willis, Robert Whytt, Stephen Hales, and others made early contributions to the knowledge of the reflex arc, but when Bell began his work, peripheral nerves were generally believed to transmit promiscuously the powers of motion and sensation. Bell’s experiments on this subject were made by laying bare the roots of the spinal nerves of living animals and demonstrating experimentally that the posterior (dorsal) nerve roots are exclusively sensory and the anterior (ventral) roots are exclusively motor in function [seeNERVOUS SYSTEM]. This discovery was reported by Bell in a monograph that was printed in 1811 under the title Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain: Submitted for the Observation of His Friends. He had been lecturing on the facts reported in the monograph to large classes in London for some years before it was published.

Through the years there has been some controversy concerning Bell’s priority in this discovery. The eminent French physiologist Franois Magendie independently published on this subject in 1822, but he later admitted Bell’s priority. The great principle of the structural and functional discreteness of the motor and sensory nerves is therefore properly called Bell’s Law. However, the term Bell–Magendie Law, which is also frequently used, does name the two most important early investigators of this phenomenon.

Bell was the first scientist to enunciate in a complete way the so-called doctrine of the specific energy of sensory nerves. The name “specific nerve energies” was coined later, in 1826, by the eminent German physiologist Johannes Müller. The nub of this doctrine, as Müller put it, is that human beings are directly aware, not of external objects, but rather of the activity of their own nerves [seeSenses]. In 1811, more than a decade before Müller wrote on this subject, Bell clearly stated:

It is admitted that neither bodies nor the images of bodies enter the brain. … If light, pressure, galvanism, or electricity produce vision, we must conclude that the idea in the mind is the result of an action excited in the eye or in the brain, not of anything received, though caused by an impression from without. The operations of the mind are confined not by the limited nature of things created, but by the limited number of our organs of sense. ([1811] 1911, pp. 18,22)

This view, in a modern, modified scientific form, is still one of the foundation stones of physiological psychology and sensory physiology.

Bell was the first physiologist to demonstrate in an adequate way the parity of the muscle sense with the five senses of antiquity. He was possibly the first physiologist to give a clear theoretical and experimental demonstration of the reciprocal innervation of antagonistic muscles. His concept of the “sensory circle” anticipated in some ways the modern concept of cybernetics as it is applied to the control of muscles in adaptive behavior.

Bell also made important contributions to the understanding of the human expression of the emotions. He first published on this topic in 1806. Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), praised Bell’s work in this field.

Bell was the author in 1833 of one of the famous Bridgewater Treatises, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design. In this interesting book he makes many important observations, such as a discussion of the role of muscle sensibility in what is commonly called touch.

Bell also published medical works. A special distortion of one side of the face is called Bell’s palsy.

However, his chief fame rests on his clear demonstration that sensory and motor functions are carried on in anatomically different sets of nerves. For this he has been classed with Harvey as one of the world’s greatest contributors to physiological science.

Leonard Carmichael

[See also the biography of MÜller, Johannes.]

WORKS BY BELL

(1811) 1911 Idee einer neuen Hirnanatomie; Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain. Original text and German translation. Leipzig: Barth. → The English version was reprinted in 1936 by Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore.

(1833) 1865 The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design. 7th ed. London: Pickering; Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boring, Edwin G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton.

Carmichael, Leonard 1926 Sir Charles Bell: A Contribution to the History of Physiological Psychology. Psychological Review 33:188–217.

Darwin, Charles (1872) 1901 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Edited by Francis Darwin. London: Murray; New York: Appleton.

Bell, Charles

(b. Edinburgh, Scotland, November 1774; d. Hallow, Worcestershire, England, 28 April 1842)

anatomy.

Bell introduced new methods of determining the functional anatomy of the nervous system. For the spinal and cranial nerves he correlated anatomical division with functional differentiation by cutting or stimulating the anatomical divisions and observing the changes produced in the experimental animals’ behavior. Bell’s techniques and observations led to Johannes Müller’s generalizations on the sensory functions of the nervous system.

Bell was the son of a minister of the Church of England. His father died when he was five, and he received his basic education from his mother. He was also tutored in art and attended Edinburgh High School for three years. Bell’s older brother John was a surgeon who gave private classes in anatomy. Charles assisted him in his classes, learning medicine from him and from lectures at Edinburgh University. He was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1799. The success of John Bell’s anatomy classes aroused the jealousy of the medical faculty of the university, who succeeded in barring him and Charles from practice in the Royal Hospital of Edinburgh.

Since his career in Edinburgh was blocked, in 1804 Bell moved to London, where he opened his own school of anatomy and gradually built up a surgical practice. He combined his skill in painting with his scientific interests in Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806). Besides being an exposition of the anatomical and physiological basis of facial expression for artists, the book included much philosophy and critical history of art. The book gained Bell some reputation and remained popular, going through several editions up to 1893. He was co-owner of and principal lecturer at the Great Windmill Street School of Anatomy, founded by William Hunter, from 1812 to 1825 and was instrumental in the founding of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1828. He returned to Edinburgh University as professor of surgery in 1836. Bell was knighted in 1831, in recognition of his scientific achievement. Further recognition came when he was selected to write the fourth Bridge-water Treatise, in which series he published The Hand in 1833.

Bell developed his experimental techniques involving the peripheral nerves in order to discover how the brain functions. In 1811 he published Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain, a book giving his views on the brain. He circulated one hundred copies to his acquaintances, then published nothing more on the subject for ten years. Bell’s first concern in Idea was to establish that the different parts of the brain serve different functions, rather than that the entire organ was involved in all functions. His statement that the peripheral nerves are composed of divisions “united for convenience of distribution” but “distinct in office” was a concomitant of this view of the brain. Each division of a peripheral nerve received its functional specificity from the part of the brain with which it was connected. This was the crucial element in what were to be Müller’s laws of sensation, and in Idea Bell incidentally stated the central law, that of specific nerve energies. It was Bell’s techniques, however, not his generalizations, that influenced Müller.

Idea included a description of an experiment that demonstrated the differing functions of each root of a spinal nerve. Bell cut the posterior roots and observed no convulsions of the muscles of the back; touching the anterior roots convulsed them. Bell did not deduce the Bell-Magendie law—that the anterior roots are motor, the posterior sensory—from the experiment. Rather, it supported his opinion that the cerebellum, which he thought was the origin of the posterior root filaments, was the locus of the involuntary nervous functions. The cerebrum, the origin of the anterior root filaments, was the locus of the voluntary nervous functions, Bell reasoned that filaments of involuntary nerves did not elicit convulsions because there was no conscious sensation of pain.

Magendie did his own experimental work, formulating and publishing the Bell-Magendie law (1822) after hearing of Bell’s work from John Shaw, Bell’s assistant at the Great Windmill School, The law was a special case of the general principle of nervous function that Bell had worked out, but it was the special case that was noted and became the subject of a bitter priority dispute between Bell and Magendie.

Bell’s later experimental studies, which he correlated with clinical observations, involved the functions of the cranial nerves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bell’s major works are Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting(London, 1806); Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain (London, 1811), a rare work that is reprinted in Gordon-Taylor and Walls; An exposition of the natural System of Nerves of the Human Body (London, 1824), which includes revisions of papers first published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; The Nervous System of the Human Body (London, 1830); and The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design (London, 1833).

II. Secondary Literature. Gordon Gordon-Taylor and E. W. Walls, sir Charles Bell, His Life and Times(London, 1958), the important work on Bell, is an accurate but discursive biography and includes a bibliography of Bell’s writings and the literature on him, J. M. D. Olmsted, François Magendie (New York, 1944), pp, 93-122, details the Bell-Magendie priority dispute.

Peter Amacher