Abstract
“Either the nerves themselves may communicate impressions different in quality to the sensorium, which in every instance remains the same; or else the vibrations of the nervous principle may in every nerve be the same,….”, etc. 1
“The results therefore fail to support the view (of Bishop and Heinbecker), that there are fiber types distinguishable by time to maximum, conduction rate, irritability and refractory period…. Since it is possible to recognize differences in the physiological responses of individual axons, it is no longer incumbent upon physiologists to adhere to the doctrine of specific nerve energies.” 2
The latter quotation seems to present a third alternative to those recognized by Johannes Müller in the former, a formulation of his doctrine of specific nerve energies. Müller emphasized the specificity of the whole sensory pathway, being unable to decide whether the differences in sensory pathways were assignable to qualitative differences in the responses of the nerve fibers concerned, or to differences in their terminal connections. The possibility apparently never occurred to him that the same fiber mediated different sensations by means of impulses of different character, which appears to be the interpretation placed by Blair and Erlanger on the variations they observe to take place in the responses of one and the same nerve fiber. Other suggestions, such as that of Adrian, that repetitive response of a fiber to its sense organ is a factor in sensation, or that the pattern in which different fibers respond is significant, are only elaborations of Müller's hypothesis, and the possibility which Blair and Erlanger propose offers the first escape since medieval philosophers debated the question in an experimental vacuum, to physiologists chafing at the restrictions of Müler's dictum.
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