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Ernest Henry Starling ( 1866-1927) was an outstanding British physiologist who contributed many fundamental ideas to this subject. These ideas were important parts of the British contribution to physiology, which at that time led the world.

He made at least four significant contributions: 1. In the capillary water is forced out by hydrostatic pressure and driven in by the osmotic pressure of plasma proteins. These opposing forces approximately balance; which is known as  Starling’s Principle. 2. The discovery of the hormone secretin — with his brother-in-law William Bayliss — and the introduction of the word hormone. 3. The analysis of the heart’s activity as a pump, which is known as the Frank–Starling law. 4. Several fundamental observations on the action of the kidneys. These include evidence for the existence of Vasopressin, the anti-diuretic hormone.

Ernest Starling became a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1882 (when he was 16). He had a brilliant career there and set his sights on becoming a Harley Street physician. But the science behind medicine —physiology— attracted him much more; he spent a long vacation in Wilhelm Kühne’s in Heidelberg, studying the mechanisms of lymph formation and convinced himself that he could become a physiologist. At that time such a job description did not exist in Britain. Guy’s had no physiological laboratories, but Starling’s enthusiasm changed all this, and he published nine papers on lymph and capillary function between 1893 and 1897. He showed that the opposing forces across the capillary wall — an outward movement of water due to hydrostatic pressure (derived from the heart’s contraction) and an inward movement, secondary to the osmotic pressure of the plasma proteins within the capillary. Without awareness of these forces, the physician cannot begin to understand such conditions as edema. The inward and outward forces are often referred to as “Starling forces”. They established him as a serious contributor. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1899.

He enjoyed collaborating with William Bayliss (1860-1924), who was on the staff of University College London (UCL), and together they published on the electrical activity of the heart and on peristalsis. In 1893 Bayliss married Gertrude, Starling’s beautiful sister, so the two were brothers-in-law. When Staring was appointed professor at UCL in 1899, the scientific family was even closer.

Bayliss and Starling investigate pancreatic secretion, which at that time was believed to be entirely under nervous control. They showed that whenever food or acid was put into the duodenum some blood -borne stimulus was released, causing the pancreas to secrete. They called this substance secretin and Starling proposed that the body produces many secretin-like molecules, and in 1905 proposed that these substances should be called hormones. By doing this, he began a whole new biological subject, which became known as endocrinology.

Starling felt passionately about many subjects, one of which was medical education. He found the lack of science behind medical practice intolerable, and when in 1910 a Royal Commission (The Haldane Commission) was set up to improve medical education, Starling was an enthusiastic contributor. One of the consequences of the Commission was the establishment of medical units in London: clinical practice supported by laboratory research is now taken for granted in every large institution. For this we must thank Starling’s and William Osler’s evidence given before the Haldane Commission. The physiological discovery most often associated with Starling is his Law of the Heart Occupying two years of his life (1910-1912) his investigations examined how the heart increased its output in response to more blood entering the organ. At first sight this might be thought self-evident, but Starling showed how many factors were involved. For this work he made use of the anesthetized dog, in an experimental arrangement known as the heart-lung preparation. This played an important role in subsequent experiments, when he was not primarily interested in blood flow. Starling was unaware of previous work by a German physiologist, Otto Frank, using the isolated frog heart. Frank showed that the length of the heart-muscle fibers controlled the force of contraction. He did this with no interest in the circulation as a whole, so his finding have to be taken in parallel with Starling’s. Starling’s law has become the Frank-Starling law. During the 1914-1918 war, Starling was involved in research into poison gases. As a commissioned officer he found the organization of the matter chaotic and on several occasions was very outspoken to his war office superiors. This did his prospects no good at all. Many of his distinguished contemporaries received knighthoods. Starling received nothing.

After his involvement with gas, the government decided to make use of his skills in a totally different way — to supervise the country’s nutrition. At the end of World War I food was very short, and Starling chaired a Royal Society committee that introduced food rationing. Germany had a similar food shortage during the war, but coped with it less successfully.

Starling returned to UCL at the end of the war. His wartime experiences had left him with a scathing vision on how the country was run, and in particular the educational system. He was especially outspoken on public (the British designation for private) school education. And particularly the teaching of classic themes: “After nine years, nine-tenths of the boys can read neither Latin nor Greek. They may have acquired a few catchwords or allusions to classical mythology, but they can give no account of the manner in which the Greeks lived, or the part played by Greek philosophy in the evolution of modern ideas, or in the way in which western government has been founded on Roman inventions.”

During the 1920’s he was very busy doing experiments and his reputation attracted distinguished collaborators. Many of these involved the heart-lung preparation. It was used to investigate the control of blood pressure (with G. V. Anrep), the activity of insulin (with F. Knowlton), and renal function (with E. B. Verney). In 1920, Starling was found to have colonic cancer, and the surgeon Arbuthnot Lane removed half of his colon. It seriously limited his exceptional physical activities: he gave up mountaineering, for example.

Starling’s relationship with the Nobel Prize is of interest. He was first proposed for the prize in 1913 by Otto Loewi (who won a prize himself, in 1936). Starling’s subject was hormones, with secretin being prominent. The assessor, J. E. Johansson, decided that Starling should certainly receive the prize, but not yet. No prize was given during World War I, and in 1920 August Krogh, a Danish physiologist, was rewarded for his work on capillaries (his findings were not actually as significant as Starling’s had been, twenty years before: but the significance of ‘Starling forces’ in the capillary had not become apparent). In 1926, Starling was proposed again, this time for his work on the kidney! On this occasion the remarkable Johansson felt that Starling’s hormone studies should have been rewarded. But by then the experiments had been done almost a quarter of a century before, and Johansson felt that the prize should be given for recent discoveries. He had forgotten that it was he who had put Starling’s work on the back burner in 1913. Subsequent British Laureates (such as Gowland Hopkins and Charles Sherrington were given the prize for work they had done twenty of thirty years before.  But by this time Johansson was no longer involved with the awarding of the prize.  It is not an edifying story. The exact circumstances of Starling’s death are far from clear.  He was on a pleasure cruise in the West Indies, but when his ship (a banana boat called Ariguani) tied up in Kingston harbor he was found to be dead.  He was apparently traveling by himself, and there were no friends or relations at his funeral —in pouring rain — in Kingston, Jamacia.  No autopsy was performed, so the cause of his death— which we might presume to be cancer secondary to his colon tumor— was never established.  His passing marked the end of an outstanding contributor to medical science. In the words of Henry Dale (in a 1927 obituary) “All had found him a generous comrade and leader, and it is impossible to think of physiology in the last thirty years without Starling as the central figure of inspiration … his courage was indomitable, his energy and his passion for knowledge flouted all restraint.”