Henry Pickering Bowditch

Henry Pickering Bowditch (April 4, 1840 – March 13, 1911) was an American soldier, physician, physiologist, and dean of the Harvard Medical School. Following his teacher Carl Ludwig, he promoted the training of medical practitioners in a context of physiological research. His teaching career at Harvard spanned 35 years. Early life Henry P. Bowditch was born to the Massachusetts Bowditch family, noted for the mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, his grandfather, and the archaeologist Charles Pickering Bowditch, his brother. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch and Lucy Orne Nichols Bowditch. In 1861, he graduated from Harvard College, and then entered Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. His studies there were interrupted by his service in the Union Army during the American Civil War, where he rose to the rank of major in the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment. After graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1868, he went to Paris to study with Claude Bernard. In Bernard’s lab he worked alongside Louis-Antoine Ranvier, later known for neuroanatomy, and Étienne-Jules Marey who promoted the use of photography to capture physiological dynamics. According to Walter Bradford Cannon, when in Paris, Bowditch joined with fellow Bostonians John Collins Warren Jr., William James, and Charles Emerson for frog-hunting parties. Bowditch continued his European studies in Bonn with Wilhelm Kuhne and Max Schultze. Ultimately he proceeded to Leipzig where Carl Ludwig was conducting the program that Bowditch would emulate at Harvard. Bowditch impressed Ludwig by constructing an improvement on the kymograph then in use. His studies in Leipzig brought him into contact with, among others, Ray Lankester, Angelo Mosso, Hugo Kronecker and Carl von Voit. Career Bowditch was appointed assistant professor of physiology at Harvard in 1871. While still in Germany, he purchased European materials to support the investigative training program he planned. And dramatically, on 9 September 1871, just days before sailing for Boston, he married Selma Knuth of Leipzig. The Bowditch laboratory at Harvard, the first physiological laboratory in the United States, began modestly in attic rooms.