Cannon's Masterpiece of Physiology: The Wisdom of the Body

To study human homeostasis, the American physiologist Walter Cannon's The Wisdom of the Body is a book one simply must read. Precisely because of Cannon's contribution, modern biology lists homeostasis and irritability as two of the six characteristics of living things (specific organization, metabolism, homeostasis and irritability, reproduction and heredity, growth and development, and evolution and adaptation are the six characteristics of organisms).

Walter Bradford Cannon was born on October 19, 1871, and died on October 6, 1945. He was one of the most influential American physiologists of the 20th century and also made outstanding contributions to psychology.

Cannon was the first to apply X-rays to physiological research. As early as his second year in medical school, Cannon designed the barium meal to observe the entire process of food passing through the digestive tract, studying the relationship between mechanical forces and gastric acid concentration during digestion and the opening and closing of the pyloric valve. In 1911, Cannon published Mechanical Factors of Digestion; the barium meal he invented remains an important diagnostic method for digestive tract diseases to this day.

During World War I he studied the effects of traumatic shock and wrote up his findings in the book Traumatic Shock. While treating the wounded during WWI, Cannon discovered some basic features of human homeostasis; these gave him inspiration and laid the foundation for his later research on human homeostasis.

Cannon discovered the important role of the endocrine glands, especially the adrenal hormones, in coping with emergencies. In 1931 he found that certain nerve endings could release a substance similar to epinephrine, which he named "sympathin." Later he made a series of discoveries concerning the autonomic nervous system and systematically elaborated the concept of "the stability of the internal environment" proposed by the 19th-century French physiologist Claude Bernard.

In 1932, Cannon wrote up his research in this area in the book The Wisdom of the Body (also titled The Wisdom of the Body), which later became a classic masterpiece on human homeostasis. In this book, Cannon systematically expounded how the human body responds to environmental changes and maintains its own homeostasis.

We now know that living organisms have many regulatory mechanisms used to keep their internal conditions relatively stable, and to do so even when certain changes occur in the environment; this property is called biological homeostasis. The more advanced the organism, the stronger its self-regulatory mechanisms.

The medical value of this homeostasis phenomenon discovered by Cannon has still not been fully tapped. Living things—especially higher vertebrates such as we humans—have, over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, developed very powerful self-regulatory capabilities.

Many diseases can be cured by making use of this innate self-regulatory ability. This means that the doctor need only provide corresponding symptomatic treatment, rather than routinely subjecting the patient to drastic, invasive procedures; relying on the organism's self-regulatory ability, the patient can recover.

Of course, this is an ideal outcome, and in most cases it can only solve some of the problems of self-limiting diseases. But there are always doctors and patients trying to use the body's homeostasis to solve patients' serious disease problems, and reports of severe cases resolved by relying on biological homeostasis appear from time to time.

For example, some patients with advanced childhood neuroblastoma, after being abandoned by the hospital and sent home to "wait for death," experienced miracles in the process: their neuroblastomas resolved without treatment. There are also some severely injured patients given a death sentence who, after simple symptomatic treatment, recovered on their own by means of the body's homeostasis.

Of course, homeostasis theory does not encourage patients to refuse treatment after falling ill; rather, by revealing this natural phenomenon, it guides the search for the corresponding best treatment method. For instance, injecting adrenal hormone is also one of the treatments that apply homeostasis to solve disease problems.

I too am exploring ways to use human homeostasis to solve patients' diseases. Many of TCM's concepts, treatment methods, and prescriptions are consistent with the homeostasis theory Cannon proposed, and some natural therapies also accord with it. That is why I have recently been reading The Wisdom of the Body, and I have gained a great deal from it.

The Chinese edition of The Wisdom of the Body was published by the Commercial Press in 1982, and it does not seem to have been reprinted since. Genuine hard copies are not easy to find now, but the electronic version is still available in the Kindle bookstore; the e-book I am reading is precisely this electronic edition.