Talk:Walter Bradford Cannon

G. Hans Selye
GHans Selye attributes the concept of homeostasis to Cannon, but the wiki attributes it to Claude Bernard...Who's right?

Biography challenge
It is evident that this is a hard biography to do even though there is ample material to support a good narrative of his life. One of the reasons is clear from the exchange found at Medical education which shows that his autobiography The Way of the Investigator may be misleading. These wiki's may be helpful to the courageous: G. W. Pierce and Wicht Club (1903 - 1911). Rgdboer 20:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

An interesting statement in the autobiography appears in the chapter "The Spirit of Adventure" (p.28):
 * First among them [demands on an investgator] is resourcefulness. ... As the frontiersman may make a corn knife out of a broken scythe blade, or a butcher knife out of a rusty file, or a soap factory from an empty barrel and an iron kettle, so the pioneering investigator may be compelled to use his ingenuity to the limit in adapting available appraratus and materials to the purposes he has in mind.

The "frontiersman" insights would be natural to George Washington Pierce's background but not to Cannon's. The book invites textual analysis. It is an important testament from a key physiologist; it is essential for understanding him.Rgdboer (talk) 22:35, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Further reading section removed
I removed the folling list of works about Cannon. This list is just to long for the article itselve. Some of them could return to the article as real reference, if they have really something te say about Cannon. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 15:49, 16 June 2008 (UTC)



Fellow of Royal Society
A biography by H.H. Hall has just been discovered by Duncan Hull and posted in references. This biography notes Cannon's venture into the subject of neurotransmission. Previously data from his Way of the Investigator and a few other sources framed his life, but the serious consideration by Hall allows an editor to improve our article. An editor that can appreciate the distance travelled since Cannon's time could make an important contribution by drawing on the new source.Rgdboer (talk) 19:18, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Service in WWI
There is passing mention he was a 'military physician' in WWI, but this could say more, eg rank achieved, any awards, countries in which he served. Today I read of him in Bill Bryson's The Body, A Guide for Occupants (published 2019), when treating his work on homeostasis, that Cannon "At the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted as a volunteer for the Harvard Hospital Unit even though he was forty-five years old and the father of five children. He spent two years in Europe as a field doctor." There seems to be no Wikipedia article whose title matches that quoted by Bryson although I understand a unit manned by Harvard doctors did go to France, its other members included Wilfred Grenfell of Labrador coast fame (a Briton born). As Cannon was born 1871, Bryson's narrative shows Cannon joined the year the USA entered WWI, 1917 rather than 1914 when hostilities broke out in Europe.Cloptonson (talk) 19:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)