Respiration

by John Scott Haldane

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Respiration; Yale University. Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures; Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures

John Scott Haldane

Yale University Press, 1922

Respiration

476 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

John Scott Haldane CH FRS was a Scottish physiologist famous for intrepid self-experimenting which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body.

Haldane visited the scenes of many mining disasters and investigated their causes. When the Germans used poison gas in World War I Haldane went to the front at the request of British secretary of state, Lord Kitchener and attempted to identify the gases being used. One outcome of this was his invention of the first gas mask. His son, J.B.S. Haldane became equally famous, both by extending his father's interest in diving and as a key figure in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Haldane was Gifford Lecturer in the University of Glasgow, Fellow of New College, Oxford, from October 1901, and Honorary Professor of the University of Birmingham. Haldane received numerous honorary degrees. He was also President of the English Institution of Mining Engineers, a Companion of Honor of the British Court, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Haldane died in Oxford at midnight on the night of March 14/March 15, 1936. He had just returned from a trip he had undertaken to investigate cases of heat stroke in the oil refineries in Persia.

Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a poem called "For J.S. Haldane", published in his anthology "A Perpetual Memory and other Poems" in 1939.

Haldane was an international authority on ether and respiration and the inventor of the gas-mask during World War I.

Haldane helped determine the regulation of breathing, and discovered the Haldane effect in hemoglobin. He was the founder of The Journal of Hygiene. In 1907 Haldane made a decompression chamber to help make deep-sea divers safer and produced the first decompression tables after extensive experiments with animals. He was also an authority on the effects of pulmonary diseases, such as silicosis caused by inhaling silica dust. After being forced out of combatting poison gases in World War I, through alleged German sympathies, he shifted into working with victims of gas warfare and developed oxygen treatment including the oxygen tent.

Haldane pioneered study of the reaction of the body to low air pressures, such as that experienced at high altitudes. He led an expedition to Pike's Peak in 1911, which examined the effect of low atmospheric pressure on respiration.

In addition to his work on mine atmospheres, he investigated the air in enclosed spaces such as wells and sewers. One surprising result of his analysis of the air in the sewers beneath the House of Commons was to show that the level of bacterial contamination was relatively low. During this research, he investigated fatalities of workmen in a sewer, and showed that hydrogen sulfide gas was the culprit.