Nobel Prize Recipient. Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, an English neurophysiologist received international recognition after being awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared jointly this coveted award with Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron of Adrian, and according to the Nobel Prize Committee, "for their discoveries regarding the functions of neurons." Before Sherrington and Adrian's research, it was widely accepted that reflexes occurred as isolated activity within a reflex arc. He received the Nobel Prize for proving that reflexes require integrated activation and demonstrated reciprocal innervation of muscles, which became known as the "Sherrington's Law." In his well-known 1906 publication, "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System," he had effectively laid to rest the theory of the nervous system. The book was a collection of ten lectures delivered two years before at Yale University in the United States. By 1863, his mother, Anne Brookes Thurtell Sherrington, was a widow with three young sons; he was the oldest. His family moved from London in the early 1860s to Ipswich. In the late fall of 1880, his widowed mother remarried to Dr. Caleb Rose, a widower, who was a noted archaeologist and scholar, as well as being a major part of his childhood. He attended local schools and was very active in sports. After a short stay at Edinburgh, he went, in 1879, to Cambridge as a noncollegiate student studying physiology, and in 1880 entered Gonville and Caius College. His education consisted of graduating from Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge with a B.A. degree in 1883; beginning medical studies in 1875 at St. Thomas's Hospital; in 1878 passing the primary examination of the Royal College of Surgeons; and a year later, passing the primary examination for the Fellowship of that College. He first became seriously interested in the nervous system after attending the 1881 medical congress in London, hearing about all the experiments and research done in England and throughout Europe. He returned to Cambridge performing his own experiments, advancing to the post of demonstrator of anatomy in 1883, and in 1884 publishing a paper on his findings. During the winter session of 1883 to 1884 at St. Thomas's Hospital, he demonstrated histology and in 1884 became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1885 he became a First Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge with distinction, and published a paper of his own on the subject of Goltz's dogs. In 1885 he also earned his M.B. degree at Cambridge and in 1886 his Licensure of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1885 he was sent first to Spain and then Venice, Italy to study the cholera epidemic. He traveled to Berlin, Germany with his findings, spending a year with Nobel Recipient Robert Koch. In 1887 upon his return to London, he was appointed Lecturer in Systematic Physiology at St. Thomas's Hospital and elected a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. In 1891 he was appointed, when the position became vacant, Superintendent of the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and Pathological Research in London. The same year his interest turned to spinal reflexes as related to muscle reflexes and he published several papers on the subject. He studied the time period in the knee-jerk reflex and coined the word "Synapse," the structure that allows electrical impulses to jump from a nerve cell to another nerve cell. In 1895 he became Professor of Physiology at the University of Liverpool. In 1913 he accepted, after a decade wait, the position of Waynflete Chair of Physiology at Oxford University. During World War I, as the Chairman of the Industrial Fatigue Board, he was employed, as a spectacle-wearing fifty-seven-year-old, in a shell factory at Birmingham working the daily 13-hour shifts, with a Sunday shift of 9 hours. After the war, he returned to Oxford and supported having female medical students. He retired from Oxford in 1936. He published his book, "Man on his Nature," which was after his Gifford Lectures for 1937 and 1938. In 1940 and 1946 Sherrington wrote two volumes entitled "The Endeavour of Jean Fernel." He was an accomplished poet. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1893,where he gave the Croonian Lecture in 1897. Besides his Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Royal Medal in 1905 and the Copley Medal in 1927. In 1922 the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and in 1924 the Order of Merit were conferred upon him. He received numerous honorary degrees from universities in Sweden, the United States, Belgium, France, Austria, Hungary, Canada, Greece, and many universities in Great Britain. He married but had one son, Charles Ely Rose Sherrington. His wife died in 1933 and with his battle with rheumatoid arthritis, he became crippled, thus was a resident in a nursing home the last year of his life. Even though he had a decline in his health, he was lucid up to the day he died of heart failure. Several scientific laws hold his name. He was honored with a stained-glass window in the dining hall of Gonville and Caius College, in Cambridge. His oil-on-canvas portrait by August John is on display in the Victorian Museum.