The Swiss physician-naturalist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) was perhaps the most prolific physiologist of the eighteenth century.
A student of Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden, Haller was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Gottingen in 1737, helping to shape it into a leasing medical institution.
In his Physiological Elements of the Human Body (1757-66), he redefined two previous known properties of life: sensibility (perception) and irritability (response). All living beings -plants and animals were said to posses both.
Sensation, according to Haller, arises when an impression of some sensible object, which has impinged on a nerve of the human body, arrives in the brain, through that nerve’s connection to the brain, so that it is thus represented to the soul.
Only nerves, he held, were sensitive; consequently, parts without nervous involvement like tendons, should feel no pain when pricked.
Von Haller based his conclusions on anatomical observations and the conducted animal experiments. He followed a conventional mechanistic approach which postulated God as the creator and first mover in a universe which, once started, ran according to mechanical laws.
Book of Physiological Elements of the Human Body
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