As an aspect of the continuing study in this laboratory of the participation of the nervous system in integrating appropriate and inappropriate adaptive reactions,1 the inflammatory response has been of prime interest.
It was a Galenic dictum that any part of the body may influence any other part through neural connections. In the 18th century, Cullen, Pinel, and Baglivi held the view that disorders of the nervous system underlay most disease processes. This emphasis gave rise to the school of "systematic correlative neuropathologists," which dominated French concepts of disease in the first half of the 19th century.2 In the latter half of the 19th century growing emphasis on localized cellular alterations overshadowed the earlier interest in generalized reactions.3
Cohnheim, in 1882,4 inferred that vasomotor nerves played no part in inflammation, but by 1909 it was established (by the work of Samuel, Meltzer, and Meltzer, and of