The History of PDN

The early days

Anatomy has most likely been taught within the University since its foundation in about 1231, for medicine was one of the earliest subjects to be studied. Initially, the teaching was of a theoretical nature based on readings of the classical texts of Galen in colleges, but the subject became established as an academic discipline in the early 16th century. In 1532 David Edwardes published from Cambridge the first anatomical text to be printed in England, and in 1549 anatomy became a statutory requirement for students of medicine. Shortly after, in 1557 John Caius introduced practical demonstrations of anatomy with dissection of the human body in his college, Gonville Hall, later to become Gonville and Caius College.

Teaching of anatomy, including demonstrations of dissection, continued to be college based during the second half of the 16th century and through the 17th century. A major shift towards more central involvement of the University was marked at the start of the 18th century when in 1707 the first Professor of Anatomy, George Rolfe, was appointed. This was followed in 1716 by the opening of the first Anatomical School, located in Queen’s Lane. With the gradual expansion of medical student numbers larger facilities were required, the School occupying three different sites in the City before the present building was opened on the Downing Site in 1938.

Further significant developments took place during the 19th century. William Clark (1817-1865), a distinguished comparative anatomist, advanced his discipline to the extent that on his retirement the Chair of Zoology was created. Responsibility for comparative anatomy was combined with that Chair, a separation that accounts for the fact that veterinary anatomy was initially taught in Zoology. Only in 1957 did Veterinary Anatomy move to its own building on the Downing Site alongside Human Anatomy, and was established as a Sub-Department.

Clark’s successor, Sir George Humphry FRS (1866-1883), was thus the first Professor of Human Anatomy. He was a founder of the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, and the inaugural President of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. During the early tenure of his office anatomy and physiology were still taught together, but in 1870 Michael Foster was appointed as Praelector in Physiology. The course of the two disciplines became further separated on Humphry’s retirement with the establishment of the Chair of Physiology.

The current days

The twentieth century saw the Department flourish as a centre of excellence for both teaching and research, and the foundations were laid for the current strengths in developmental biology and neuroscience. Dixon Boyd (1951-1968) was renowned for his meticulous research on human fetal and placental development, and built up one of the world’s most cosmprehensive collections of embryological material that continues to be an important international resource today. More recently, Hans Kuypers FRS (1984-1989) fostered the Department’s strength in neuroanatomy and functional neuroscience, and in his own research pioneered innovative techniques for tracing complex neural networks.

During Hans Kuypers’s tenure the post of Clinical Anatomist was established to provide a focus for the teaching of clinically relevant topographical human anatomy at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Professor Harold Ellis was the first incumbent in 1988. The success of the venture led to the establishment of the equivalent Clinical Veterinary Anatomist position when, in 1993, the Sub-Department of Veterinary Anatomy was incorporated into the main Department. The teaching of both human and veterinary anatomy remains firmly rooted in cadaveric dissection, but sessions centred on common clinical procedures, live anatomy, and modern imaging techniques, such as ultrasound and endoscopy, ensure that it maintains a contemporary theme.

Anatomy remains at the core of preclinical medical and veterinary education, just as it did in the earliest days of the University, and the Department is committed to providing teaching of the highest quality to meet the needs of future practioners. At the research level the subject has undergone major transformations with the advent of sophisticated imaging techniques operating at the whole-body, through live cells down to the ultrastructural level, the introduction of model systems such as zebrafish and drosophila, the ability to identify and trace specific cell types with unique markers, and other major advances. In the post-genomic era anatomy is enjoying a resurgence as investigators seek to localise gene changes to specific sites, to understand cell-cell interactions during morphogenesis, or to trace and analyse complex neural networks. The study of gene through to function is a powerful research paradigm, and one which the bringing together again of Anatomy and Physiology will foster and enhance.

Early historical details based on The History of Anatomy in Cambridge by Dr CWM Pratt.

The legacy of Sir Michael Foster

The story of the earliest days of the Laboratory is in effect the story of a single man, Michael Foster. Physiology was taught here essentially as a branch of Anatomy until the appointment of Foster not by the University but by Trinity College (as Praelector in Physiology), apparently acting in response to suggestions by Huxley, G. H. Lewes and his wife, the author George Eliot. The University at first simply supplied a room, furnished with basic equipment by Trinity, though in 1878 a purpose-built laboratory was constructed on the east side of Downing Street near the recently-opened Cavendish Laboratories. In a preface to his Studies from the Physiological Laboratory in the University of Cambridge Foster expressed his gratitude for being permitted to occupy ‘at some inconvenience to others, the two University rooms in which my lectures are given, the practical teaching of my class conducted and the physiological work carried on. I have presumed on their kindness and ventured to call these rooms the Physiological Laboratory of the University of Cambridge’.

 Though Foster’s contributions to research were not enduring, the hallmark of his teaching was a passionate commitment to the principle that learning should be firmly based on observation and experiment, and the closest integration between lectures and practicals. In Foster’s Royal Society obituary, W. H. Gaskell wrote that Foster "insisted that practical work, carried on by the student himself, illustrative of the facts on which the lecture was based, must

immediately follow the lecture. (In this he was following principles used by Huxley). The physiology of each organ must be dealt with as a whole in the lecture, and the practical work must be so arranged as to bring home to the student all of the points of each lecture at the time ... His ideal laboratory would be of sufficient size to provide each student with his own working place, both in the histological and in the chemical department at the same time. He also - and this was one of the great reasons of his success - encouraged his students at the very earliest moment to engage in some original research, and then persuaded them to give a few lectures of an advanced character upon the subject on which they were working: for, as he said, there is no way of discovering gaps in your knowledge of a subject better than lecturing on it." From these principles can be traced not only the present Part II, with its research projects that frequently result in published papers, but also the Foster Club at which members of the laboratory talk relatively informally about what they are doing. (Another legacy is the lab cricket team: Foster was also an avid cricketer, and organised annual matches between the staff and students, or the staff and assistants, in which he would himself be captain.)

In 1883 Foster’s work was recognised by the foundation of the first Professorship of Physiology in the University; by then he was heavily occupied with the editorship of the Journal of Physiology, founded in 1878, with successive editions of his influential Text-book of Physiology, and his secretaryship of the Royal Society; he had also been one of the prime movers in creating the Physiological Society itself. J. N. Langley wrote of him: "Sir Michael Foster’s varied work in life was only made possible by his sincere and genuine nature. He was a man of large aims, and generous enthusiasms, of strong initiative and unusual powers of inducing others to see as he did."

Langley and Adrian

At his death, in 1907, Foster left behind him a team of enthusiasts, of whom perhaps John Newport Langley was to be the most influential. Langley was not a natural lecturer: Dale wrote that he "had no gift of inspiration as a lecturer , but I got more from Langley than I recognised at the time", while Joseph Barcroft recalled that his lectures were mines of information but difficult to follow, but that as a Demonstrator it was a matter of conscience to Langley to demonstrate through each class period and to get to know each man individually: it was then that his greatness was conveyed to the student. As well as being an energetic editor of the Journal, and nearly single-handedly establishing the physiology of the autonomic nervous system, as Professor (1903) he presided over the Laboratory’s move in 1914 to the handsome building provided by the generosity of the Drapers Company. 

One of the lecturers at that date was Edgar Adrian, later Baron Adrian of Cambridge, O.M., F.R.S. and Nobel Laureate, President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College.  His basement room, inherited from Keith Lucas, the brilliant experimentalist so tragically killed in a flying accident during the war, was specially shielded from vibrations that might disturb the string galvanometers and capillary electrometers used for electrical recording. It contained, in Carl Pfaffman’s words the most glorious clutter ever seen’ (as can be verified in the photograph on the left, taken by Peter Starling in 1964 - with some items that had lain untouched for 40 years). 

It was here, during ‘one day’s experiment that Adrian suddenly realised while recording using his new amplifier from a frog nerve-muscle preparation that what seemed to be a tiresomely oscillating electrical artefact only occurred when the muscle was hanging unsupported: "The explanation suddenly dawned on me ... a muscle hanging under its own weight ought, if you come to think of it, to be sending sensory impulses up the nerves coming from the muscle spindles ... That particular day’s work, I think, had all the elements that one could wish for. The new apparatus seemed to be misbehaving very badly indeed, and I suddenly found it was behaving so well that it was opening up an entire new range of data ... it didn’t involve any particular hard work, or any particular intelligence on my part. It was just one of those things which sometimes happens in a laboratory if you stick apparatus together and see what results you get.

Written by by Prof. R. H. S. Carpenter.

References

W. J. O’Connor (1988) Founders of British Physiology: A biographical dictionary, 1820-1885, Manchester University Press
E. D. Adrian (1954) Memorable experiences in research, Diabetes 3 17-18
Joseph Barcroft (1925) Nature 116 872-3
J. K. Bradley, E. M. Tansey (1996) The coming of the electronic age to the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory: E. D. Adrian's valve amplifier in 1921, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 50 217-228
W. H. Gaskell (1908) Proc. Roy. Soc. B 80 lxx-lxxxi
A. L. Hodgkin (1992) Chance and Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War, Cambridge University Press
A. L. Hodgkin (1977) Chance and design in electrophysiology: an informal account of certain experiments on nerve carried out between 1934 and 1952, In The Pursuit of Nature, A. L Hodgkin (Ed), Cambridge University Press
J. N. Langley (1925) University of Cambridge: Department of Physiology. Methods and Problems of Medical Education, Third Series, The Rockefeller Foundation, New York, pp. 7-17
G. M. Shepherd and Janice Brown (1989) The peak of electrochemical experiments in physiology: a unique view through Walter Miles’ "Report of a Visit to Foreign Laboratories" in 1920, Caduceus 5 1-84

The early days of comparative anatomy

Comparative anatomy has a long and noble history. Claudius Galen’s second century studies of animal brains in On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body paved the way for modern neuroscience. In the seventeenth century,

William Harvey (a Cambridge medical graduate) developed his famous theory of the circulation of the blood based largely on a description of the one-way valves in the heart in an earlier veterinary text by the Italian Carlo Ruini: Anatomia del Cavallo (Anatomy of the Horse). And in the nineteenth century, comparative morphology was central to the debates about the interplay between embryonic development and species evolution that continue to this day - see, for example, Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie der Organismen.

Yet veterinary anatomy - the dedicated study of the structure of the major domestic species - gained momentum rather more slowly, as the veterinary profession developed in Britain and around the world. Although usually directed at training future clinicians, Cambridge’s scientific ethos has meant that the subject has here always had strong roots in developmental and evolutionary biology. We often wonder how medical students cope ‘without anything with which to compare’ their target species.

Cambridge's Veterinary School

Although Cambridge is the third oldest extant university in Europe, its veterinary school is relatively young, having started in earnest in 1949 with the intake of a grand total of eight veterinary undergraduates.

Forerunners of the Vet School included a large animal disease research station established by the Department of Pathology in 1909, and a pre-clinical veterinary course starting in 1935 - the latter consisting of an only-slightly-modified Natural Sciences course which qualified its graduates to carry out their clinical training at another veterinary school.

Although plans were in place some years earlier, in 1949 the Professor of Zoology, Sir James Gray, created the first University Demonstratorship in Veterinary Anatomy to support the new veterinary course. The appointee was Reg Green, who was to dominate the development of Veterinary Anatomy in Cambridge for three decades.

Veterinary Anatomy was very much a Cinderella subject at first. It was planned as an additional part of the second year Mammalian Zoology course, but prospective vets had to cram the course into the summer vacation between their first and second years. The burdens on the students were great and the decades since have been a continuing story of trying to reduce this load as much as possible - unlike most students, veterinary students must spend many weeks of the university vacations gaining extramural experience.

As part of the Department of Zoology, Veterinary Anatomy was housed on one side of the Zoology courtyard, although its tenure there was to be brief. After some internal wrangling, it was decided in the 1950s that the discipline was to flee the nest of its mother-department and be established in its own purpose-built building. By coincidence, the only appropriate available plot was next to the Department of Anatomy, and the head of that department agreed to the proximity of the veterinary interlopers as long as he was "in no way bothered".

Reg Green was instrumental in the design and management of the new building programme and in 1958 thirty students boldly strode through the doors of what is still the hub of veterinary anatomy teaching at Cambridge.

The 1960s

The new building contained a purpose-built dissection room, embalming room, museum, library, lecture theatre and offices. Many of these are still in use today, albeit in renovated form, although the adjacent Anatomy Department often encroached into this veterinary-dedicated sanctum. At the time of the move, the newly inaugurated Sub-Department of Veterinary Anatomy employed five teaching officers and fourteen assistant staff, with Reg Green as its ‘Deputy Director’. The tradition of long-serving, dedicated staff was also becoming well established - for example, Roger Akester was to teach in the Sub-Department from 1959 to 1991.

The 1960s saw the start of a gradual freeing of veterinary students from studying human anatomy. Just as the veterinary course had been seen as an ‘add-on’ to Zoology, so was it initially viewed by Anatomy. However, the vets were soon spared the experience of human dissections, and their lectures also gradually diverged from those delivered to the medics. The establishment of the Medical Sciences Tripos in 1965 allowed another rethink of the veterinary curriculum and Veterinary Anatomy slowly became a subject in its own right instead of a curricular afterthought.

A thriving, vibrant intellectual atmosphere pervaded Veterinary Anatomy. Staff and students were constantly re-evaluating what they discovered in the dissections. Typical of this was Reg Green’s re-analysis of the functions of muscles - a simpler system than is available in any text book, elements of which are still taught at Cambridge to this day. Other advances included a greater understanding of the development of the ruminant stomach, the morphological variations in the mammalian placenta and respiration in birds.

Several of the teaching staff were to use their time in the Sub-Department as a springboard to illustrious careers. Ian Silver (taught until 1970) was to take up a chair at Bristol, Barry Cross (taught until 1967) was to become Head of the Babraham Institute and Alan Findlay (student from 1958, taught 1967-1970) became a stalwart of the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory and Senior Tutor of Churchill College.

From the 1970 to the late 1980s

In the 1970s the Sub-Department continued to thrive and student numbers gradually increased to around forty, mirroring the success of the Vet School. In 1975, the Departments of Animal Health and Veterinary  Clinical Studies merged to form the Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine at the site on Madingley Road (although the word ‘Clinical’ was dropped from the name in 2004).

Back in the centre of Cambridge, this decade also saw the appointment of yet more long-standing members of staff. David Chivers (student from 1963, taught 1970-present) is a primatologist active in conservation, and was also appointed to Veterinary Anatomy’s first Readership. The Reverend Jonathan Holmes (student from 1967, taught 1977-present) is now Dean of Queens’ College chapel. John Brackenbury (taught 1984-present) is a zoologist with particular interests in animal locomotion and exercise.

Over the years we have also been fortunate to be assisted (i.e. organised) by a series of excellent technicians, some also extremely longstanding (longsuffering?), including Geoff Hopkins, Ian Edgar, John Holder and Roger Tattersall.

After a spectacularly long tenure at the helm, Reg Green retired in 1983 and Donald Steven was appointed ‘Director’ - a student at Cambridge from 1954, he had started teaching in Veterinary Anatomy in 1961. Steven was an explorer of that most diverse mammalian organ, the placenta, and his research and teaching were both leavened by his wit and endearingly clear pen and ink drawings. This author was a student during the Steven era and selected the above image as his own personal favourite example of Steven’s opus.

From the late 1980s to the 1990s

The late 1980s brought considerable uncertainty for Veterinary Anatomy, as well as the Vet School. The Riley Report on veterinary education in the UK was published in 1988 and it recommended that two of the six schools be closed - selecting Cambridge and Glasgow for annihilation. There was considerable uproar at this recommendation, including protests by the great and the good, as well as students of the day. Unusually for the government of that time, this external pressure seemed to achieve its aim and the veterinary course at Cambridge was saved. This was fortunate for all concerned, as veterinary student numbers in the UK have increased dramatically ever since.

There were also problems closer to home. Donald Steven was becoming increasingly ill, and had to leave his post in 1990. His place was temporarily taken by another placental biologist, Graham Burton (taught 1978-1991, still active in the department).

As ‘Acting Director’, Burton had to steer Veterinary Anatomy through some troubled waters. The ethos and practice of university funding was changing and departments’ financial stability was depending more and more on their research output and less on their teaching. Yet Cambridge realised that, whatever the prevailing regime, teaching remained the raison d’être of a University. In 1993 the status of Veterinary Anatomy was to change greatly. The sub-department was merged with the Department of Anatomy and the number of ring-fenced teaching staff in Veterinary Anatomy was reduced.

However, to counterbalance these changes, a new position of University Clinical Veterinary Anatomist was created. This was a post dedicated to organising the teaching of veterinary anatomy to undergraduates, and delivering of much of that teaching. The intention was that the post would be filled by someone with clinical experience, able to enthuse students about the practical relevance of the material they were learning.

In 1993, the first appointee to this role was John Grandage, a famously affable chap who had previously taught in Australia. He introduced a renewed sense of clinical relevance to the course, and also oversaw the redesign of veterinary pre-clinical subjects that took place in the 1990s. From this point onwards, first-year students would study a course in Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology (although the former greatly outweighed the latter) and in the second year they would study separate courses in neuroanatomy, reproductive biology and comparative vertebrate biology.

Pressures on the timetable were great and Grandage ‘fought his corner’ for veterinary anatomy and also efficiently organised the time he was allocated. Along with other staff, he was also actively engaged with the Vet School in the development of the veterinary curriculum as a whole. For example, he drove the increased use of radiography as a bridge between anatomy and the clinical course.

From the 2000s to current days

Grandage returned to Australia in 2002 and the following year saw the appointment of the second, and current, University Clinical Veterinary Anatomist, David Bainbridge.  Himself a student in the Department from 1986, Bainbridge’s subsequent career interest had been (at the risk of repetition) the biology of early pregnancy and placentation. He had heard of the vacancy when invited back to Cambridge to speak at a Festschrift meeting to celebrate the work of Donald Steven.
Since that time the course has developed further. The evolutionary, developmental and biomechanical underpinnings of veterinary anatomy are stressed yet further, and are increasing linked to areas of clinical importance. The students now receive an introduction to ultrasound and MRI, and get the chance to interpret these newer modes of diagnostic imaging. Dissection remains the core of the course, however, and dissection of large hoofed mammals has been given new impetus by the transfer of entire sessions to the new post mortem room at Madingley Road. ‘Live Anatomy’, in which students are able to apply what they have learnt in dissection to living, breathing animals has also become a central part of the course. Time has even been freed for a new course in the second year, dedicated to that most complex anatomical construct, the vertebrate head.

With his background in reproductive biology, Bainbridge now also organises the Veterinary Reproductive Biology course - an integrated course in anatomy and physiology. In an ironic but intellectually rewarding reversal of the ‘escape from Natural Sciences’ in the1950s, this course is now shared with Natural Sciences students.

At the start of 2006, the Departments of Anatomy and Physiology merged to create the descriptive, if magniloquent, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. We believe that this change will be good for what is now called the ‘Veterinary Anatomy Programme’. The combined department is now the major partner in undergraduate veterinary teaching, and the Physiology Department has brought with it many staff inherently sympathetic to all things veterinary.

Veterinary Anatomy remains a small but important element of the Cambridge mix. As a small subject it is important to make ourselves heard throughout the university. However, our small size - we teach around seventy students each year - is also our greatest advantage. We are, for example, extremely responsive to student opinion. The atmosphere is cheerful, sociable and sometimes even irreverent, and we believe that the veterinary students see us as their ‘spiritual home’ during their pre-clinical years. Who would have thought that dissection could be a social highlight of the student week? We continually strive to teach what is important and what is interesting, while supporting the aim that veterinary graduates should be able to cope with anything thrown at them. Most of all, we try to foster the sense of inquiry, independence and good humour essential for students destined for such a prestigious and responsible career.

 

Written by David Bainbridge, and based on written material by Reg Green (up to 1970) and the reminiscences of other veterinary anatomy teaching staff (after 1970). Please contact David Bainbridge if you feel that anything is wrong, or if you can add anything to our archives.

In 2005 the separate Departments of Anatomy and Physiology proposed to the University the establishment of a single Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience. The proposal followed extensive discussions and consultation, involving the Council of the School of the Biological Sciences, the Faculty Board of Clinical Medicine, the Faculty Board of Biology, and the staff of the two Departments.

The two Departments already shared common areas of research interests. Thus, one of the principal aims of the merger was to create a Department with significant critical mass and a modernised infrastructure, that would be well-placed to attract grant funding and develop an international reputation at the cutting edge of bioscience research. This improved research environment provides for enhanced opportunities to recruit of research fellows, postdoctoral workers, and graduate students.

The merged Department has four basic research areas: namely Cellular and Systems Physiology, Developmental and Reproductive Biology, Neuroscience, and Form and Function. Each of these areas spans research from the genetic and molecular level to the level of the functioning systems and behaving organism, reflecting the integrative nature of the Department's research.

The new institution is looking to enhance its research capabilities further through the establishment of a biomedical research unit, centred around an appointment to a proposed new Professorship of Molecular Biology in the field of Integrative Biology for which an endowment has been received through the will of Dr Herchel Smith.

The creation of a new Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience provides scope for restructuring teaching Both the Departments of Anatomy and Physiology made major contributions to the preclinical teaching of medical and veterinary students. In recent years the teaching load has increased as a result of rising student numbers, the implementation of requirements of the professional bodies (namely the General Medical Council and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons) and the proliferation of courses and practical sessions to meet those demands.

The merger makes possible the integration of courses currently taught separately to medical and veterinary students and natural science students. In addition, the creation of one integrated Department facilitates increased collaboration with the Clinical School in both preclinical and clinical teaching, and the development of a more structured training programme at the postgraduate level to meet the expectations of the Research Councils and the students.

A major programme of refurbishment accompanies the merger and new research facilities in the Physiology building are already nearing completion with the support of SRIF-2 funding. The needs of the merged Department will be given a high priority for funding through further infrastructure initiatives.

The merger also creates significant economies of space and greater efficiency in the use of core facilities with, for example, a single library. This merged institution also provide opportunities for cost-effective financial management policies and savings in recurrent costs, together with scope, through research grant funding.