Bennet Dowler

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Bennet Dowler (1797-1879) was a physician and physiologist of the United States.^[1]

Biography[]

He was born in Moundsville, Virginia, and received an M.D. from the medical school of the University of Maryland.^[1][2] He settled in Clarksburg, Virginia, where he was postmaster for four years.^[2]

In 1836, he settled in New Orleans, where he founded the Academy of Sciences, and for some years edited The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. His many experiments upon the condition of the human body immediately after death resulted in valuable discoveries in contractibility, calorification, and capillary circulation.^[1]

His researches on animal heat, in health, in disease, and after death, which have been published in various medical journals, disclosed the fact that post-mortem calorification after death from fever, cholera, sunstroke, etc., rises in some cases much higher than its antecedent maximum during the progress of the trouble.^[2]

In 1845 Dowler began a series of experiments in comparative physiology on the alligator of Louisiana, which led him to conclude that, after decapitation, the head and, especially, the trunk afford evidences of possessing the faculties of sensation and motion for hours, and that the headless trunk, deprived of all the senses but that of feeling, still retains the powers of perception and volition, and may act with intelligence in avoiding an irritant. As the result of those discoveries, he held that the functions and structure of the nervous system constitute a unity inconsistent with the assumption of four distinct and separate sets of nerves, and a corresponding four-fold set of functions.^[2]

He was a fellow and founder of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquities, Copenhagen, a permanent member of the American Medical Association, and founded the New Orleans Academy of Sciences.^[2]

He is the author of a Tableau of the Yellow Fever of 1853 (1854).^[1]

References[]

Further reading[]

• Riess, Karlem (1961). "The Rebel Physiologist—Bennet Dowler". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 16 (1): 39–48. doi:10.1093/jhmas/XVI.1.39. ISSN 0022-5045. JSTOR 24620836.
• Ripley, George; Dana, Charles A., eds. (1879). "Dowler, Bennet" . The American Cyclopædia.