The Great War's new body

After Starling and William Bayliss identified secretin in 1902, they began to consider how The Fluids of the Body—the title of one of Starling's books—affect organs at a distance, and how hormones compound nervous responses to generate rapid bodily reactions. 3 years later, Charles Sherrington spoke for the first time of “integrative action” carried out by reflex arcs and more complex neural networks, and by 1910 Walter Cannon at Harvard had begun to consider how particular pathologies or encounters generated body-wide emotional and physiological reactions. Pathologies emerged that had to do with the brittleness of integration: brain injuries, which seemed so diverse as to challenge theories of local brain functions and suggested that every patient needed to be studied and treated individually; sepsis, which was treated as a whole-body disease that could not be stopped after its onset; so-called wound shock, in which the body sought to protect itself against an injury by hiding blood in the capillaries, only to find its systems collapsing one after the other from a sharp drop in blood pressure. [...]vital and delicate was this balance that Cannon would later ask, while writing up his own thesis on the wisdom of the body, simply, “why don't we die daily?” The physician and physiologist who were charged with alleviating “the pain, mental and physical, associated with sickness and disability, or the cutting off of a man by disease in the prime of life”, Starling wrote, also sought to reintegrate the individual back into a healthy and productive community, which for soldiers fortunate enough to survive was difficult as they were reminders of a war the world would much rather forget.