An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, Volume 1: Biological Rhythms Emerge as a Subject of Scientific Research

329 Pages·2022·7.351 MB·English

by  Jole Shackelford

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF CHRONOBIOLOGY VOLUME I
Biological Rhythms Emerge as a Subject of Scientific Research
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JOLE SHACKELFORD

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University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2022, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4732-5
ISBN 10: 0-8229-4732-3
Cover art: This sculpture adorns a wall behind a grave in St. Sebastian’s Cemetery in
Salzburg, Austria, home also for the remains of the famous sixteenth-century German
physician and lay preacher Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as
Paracelsus. Photo by the author.
Cover design: Joel W. Coggins
IN MEMORIAM
Franz Emanuel Halberg
endocrinologist and chronobiologist
July 5, 1919–June 9, 2013
Richard Max Shackelford
geneticist and endocrinologist
January 23, 1915–September 19, 2007
William Coleman
historian of science and medicine
July 2, 1934–April 28, 1988

CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
General Introduction 3
7 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I 27
1 RHYTHMIC PHENOMENA, MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND VITALISM IN
ENLIGHTENMENT BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 37
2 BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS AND THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT 65
3 PHYSICOCHEMICAL REDUCTIONISM AND EXOGENOUS CAUSES OF PLANT RHYTHMS 86
4 INHERITED CAUSES OF DAILY RHYTHMS? 123
5 ENDOGENOUS RHYTHMICITY AND BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS 149
6 PHOTOPERIODISM AND BIRD MIGRATION 175
7 CYCLES AND RHYTHMS IN METABOLISM, DIGESTION, AND SPONTANEOUS ACTIVITY 202
CONCLUSION 233
7 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Notes 239
Bibliography 283
Index 305

PREFACE AND AC KNOWLEDGMENTS
MY interest in the history of chronobiology began unexpectedly in the
autumn of 2008 with a telephone call from an elderly colleague at the Univer-
sity of Minnesota. The voice was clear, and the articulation distinct, given an
aura of clarity and precision by a hint of a German accent, or so it seemed to
me at the time. The speaker wondered if he could use an image I had posted on
my personal website, which depicted the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in
conversation with the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli— a
photograph of a mural detail on the ceiling of the Clementinum in Prague that
I took on the occasion of the four- hundredth anniversary of Tycho’s death. I
had studied Tycho Brahe’s scientific ideas and practices as part of my doctoral
research and published several papers on his alchemical interest and was
accordingly invited to participate in a conference on his life and work in the
former imperial capital, where he had died in 1601. I was at home in Prague; a
student of late medieval and early modern European science and medicine
sharing ideas in one of Europe’s great centers for this history in my period of
specialty. I could not have imagined then that this photograph would lead me
to spend more than a decade immersed in the modern biology that lies behind
the volumes of this current work. The path from early modern European
science and medicine to nineteenth- and twentieth- century biology has led
me into historiographical territory that my graduate training in the history of
science and medicine did not specifically prepare me for and warrants some
explanation, not least for younger colleagues who might balk at stepping off
their own familiar paths to follow new guides.
Tycho Brahe is well- known to historians of science for his place in the
development of modern astronomy. Riccioli is less famous, but he is noted for
his early investigation of sunspots. The image in the Clementinum is fanciful,
since owing to their difference in age the two astronomers cannot possibly
have met in real life, the painting being an emblem of the Counter-
Reformation Catholic church’s resistance to Copernicus’s heliocentric plane-
tary system. But this did not matter to the man on the phone. He said that he
had looked in vain for a suitable image of Riccioli, which he wished to use for
ix