He began to study the nervous influence on cardiac contraction and was the first to demonstrate, in 1850, the refractory period of the heart muscle. The innervations of the heart were a subject of numerous projects throughout his career. In another study he established the importance of the neck muscles on stability. His work was hailed, and the French Academy awarded him the most prestigious Monthyon Prize for his work on the influence of the autonomic nervous system on body temperature and bone nutrition. At this stage Schiff applied for the position of Privatdozent in zoology at the

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical University of Göttingen. The university was ready to accept him, but the Ministry in Hanover, taking intoaccount his ancestry and liberal revolutionary past, vetoed the appointment. In 1856, Schiff moved to Bern as an assistant professor of Comparative Zoology.

He conducted studies on the influence of the autonomic nervous system on the production of sugar in the liver, thus explaining Claude Bernard’s observation of the appearance of diabetes following Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical some brain lesions. It was during these studies that Schiff described the occurrence of extension of the forelimbs together with paradoxical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical respiration as a grave prognostic sign after spinal cord injury. This observation was repeated by Sherrington 40 years later, and the eponym “Schiff–Sherrington reflex” was thus coined.2 In 1856 Schiff demonstrated that animals of various species could not survive after removal of the thyroid gland, but neither physiologists nor physicians of that time were prepared for the study of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical this ductless

gland. This pioneering work passed unnoticed, to be recognized only three decades later.3 FLORENCE Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical After Italy’s second War of Independence, it was decided to restore the prestigious academic level of the Italian universities that had suffered during the post-Napoleonic Austrian occupation. Matteucci, the renowned physiologist and Schiff’s former mentor in Paris, was now an eminent statesman, and he invited Schiff, whose fame as a superb experimenter had spread, to chair and lead physiological research at the University of Florence. In 1862 Moritz Schiff went to Florence together with his brother Hugo, the inventor of the Schiff reagent. In Florence Schiff’s productivity flourished. MK8776 He continued and expanded his studies on the vasomotor nerves and their central origin and on the innervations of the heart. As part of his neurophysiologic studies, he tried to quantify sensations by the size of the pupil (Figure 1).4 Figure 1 Moritz Schiff, circa 1860. The production and fate of bile salts engaged many selleck scientists. In 1860 Schiff proposed his solution to the problem. He returned the excreted bile, collected via a fistula, into the duodenum and demonstrated definitively the re-absorption of bile salts from the intestines in a positive feedback loop.