Club d'Histoire des Neurosciences Club Officiel de la Société des Neurosciences Française http://jeangael.barbara.free.fr Cette conférence a été prononcée lors du second colloque international de la European Society for the History of Science et la Société Française d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques intitulé Echanges franco-britanniques entre savants depuis le XVIIe siècle. Maison française d’Oxford, 2006. Franco-British relations in Neurophysiology in Edgar Adrian’s Era J.G. BARBARA. Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Neurobiologie des Processus Adaptatifs CNRS UMR 7102. Recherches Epistémologiques et Historiques sur les Sciences Exactes et les Institutions Scientifiques REHSEIS CNRS UMR7596. Case 14, 7 quai Saint Bernard, Paris 75005, France. E-mail address: Jean-Gael.Barbara@snv.jussieu.fr. Alfred Fessard (1900-1982) was the key Figure in French Post-War Neurophysiology, and a distinguished electrophysiologist, in both microphysiology (the electrophysiology of single nerve fibres and single sensitive organs) and brain physiology (including early electroencephalography). We have been studying for over three years, with Claude Debru and his group, the role of Fessard’s personality and institutional policy in the foundation, after 1945, of modern French neurophysiology, in the Marey Institute and at the Collège de France. The stories of the Marey Institute and Fessard are illustrative of the Franco-British relations in physiology, especially with Cambridge, from the end of the XIXth century to the mid XXth century. The story begins in 1898, when the fourth International Physiological congress was held in Cambridge. Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) prompted the creation of an International Commission for the unification of graphical instruments used in physiology. The idea was accepted and Marey built a small cottage, with assistance from the French Government, the city of Paris and the Royal Society (London), to host the commission and preserve physiological instruments. This building would later become the C.N.R.S. Institute Fessard created after Second World War. After Marey’s death in 1904, Louis Lapicque soon became the French prominent figure in French nervous physiology. Franco-British relations were excellent and Lapicque was in close contact with Henry Dale, Edgar Adrian, and Archibald Hill. The Lapicques were famous for organising parties in Paris. However, Louis Lapicque became scientifically increasingly isolated, when he extended his concept of chronaxie from a simple measure of nervous tissues’ excitability to a grand theory of nervous transmission. His theory was based on isochronism, the idea that nervous transmission occurred between two elements only and only if they shared the same excitability. As William Rushton from Cambridge put it in the 70s: “[Isochronism] had never been accepted in Cambridge.” In his book entitled “L’Excitabilité en Fonction du Temps” published in 1926, Lapicque attacked the results of Keith Lucas, the supervisor of Edgar Adrian, calling Lucas “an engineer turned to physiology”. Lucas was killed in an airplane accident in 1916. By 1930, Rushton, an admirer of Lucas, was determined to attack Lapicque. Rushton wrote: “Lapicque was a formidable opponent, Napoleonic in the mobility with which he varied his fighting positions […] I met Lapicque only once. It was in 1932 at the international Physiological Congress in Rome […] Lapicque was charming. He asked me to object to the paper he would be giving on chronaxie “and (as Lapicque said) we shall have one or two coups de boxe, no knockouts, judged on points. And you”, turning to Gasser (the prominent American electrophysiologist) and the rest, “you must be the judges.” In 1937, when the controversy