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Inhibition was discovered in the heart about 125 years ago by the brothers Weber. It was described in the frog central nervous system nearly 100 years ago by Sechenov and by Pavlov in invertebrate muscle. Nevertheless, inhibition became almost a dirty word among physiologists of the first half of the 20th Century. As late as 1955 a leading textbook said that "inhibition is a term of convenience, used without exact definition." The index of the 1939 Symposium on the Synapse carried only one reference and that to "Wedensky inhibition." Likewise, only one reference is to be found in the index of the 1953 Symposium on Brain Mechanisms. In contrast, nearly every speaker at the 1957 Symposium on Reticular Formation in Detroit discussed aspects of inhibition. I noted this change in my own discussion and suggested that the index of that volume would list the many references. Curiously, and perhaps as