This ambitious leap ended in a crash, but the attempts initiated by Schiff are nowadays regarded as the very early roots of functional imaging of the brain.11 It is quite curious that this important and pioneering contribution of Schiff is missing from his former biographical notes and is reported here for the first time.

Soon after going to Florence, Schiff declared openly his attitude to vivisection in the popular daily journal, La Nazione (January 1864). He regarded the use of animals as a necessity permissible only when fulfilling two conditions: the research could be conducted only on a whole animal, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and it should be rendered painless by using general anesthesia. For nearly 10 years he worked peacefully, but trouble started upon Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the arrival in Florence of the British activist, Frances P. Cobbe, who started a vicious crusade against the use of animals in Schiff’s experiments. In her campaign, Cobbe wrote defamatory letters to the British press that became increasingly tainted with

anti-Semitic rhetoric, incited Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the British community of Florence, and, finally, some influential local figures added chauvinistic arguments to the vicious campaign. The British Medical Journal12 came out in defense of Schiff and condemned the malicious ignorance of the offenders, but in vain. Schiff fought back, but Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the subject became a court issue, and he had no choice but to flee to a new haven, Geneva. GENEVA The Faculty of http://www.selleckchem.com/products/epacadostat-incb024360.html Medicine in Geneva was opened in 1872. Four years later, after the resignation of Brown-Séquard from a chair he never occupied, Schiff accepted an invitation to chair the Department of Experimental Physiology. After a prolonged public debate in which Schiff convinced the anti-vivisectionists

that his experiments were necessary for the advancement of medicine and were conducted under impeccable ethical care, he was finally able to proceed with Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical his experiments. Schiff’s new laboratory became a center for visits by many scientists and was hailed by Claude Bernard as well as by German from scientists. He became known as a scientist who took nothing for granted, one who checked and rechecked his results to perfection. It was no wonder that when two eminent Swiss surgeons, Theodor Kocher and Jacques-Louis Reverdin, struggled with goiters common in Switzerland, Schiff was asked to return to his thyroidectomy experiments of 1856. Schiff demonstrated again that the effects of thyroidectomy in humans were identical to those in all other mammals. His pioneering discovery was that thyroid “grafts into the peritoneum reversed, though temporarily, the effects of thyroidectomy”. He therefore suggested preparing “a thyroid paste” for repeated injections, but explained that his laboratory conditions were not suitable for such a project.