Chemical Control of Pulmonary Ventilation

Abstract

IN my first lecture I shall deal with chemoreceptors — that is, the nervous structures that control the lungs according to the chemical composition of the blood. Their discovery by Heymans and Bouckaert¹ represents one of the greatest revolutions in the physiology of respiration. It is not as if the idea of a control of respiratory movements by peripheral nerves were something entirely new, since Hering and Breuer,² nearly a hundred years ago, discovered the so-called self-regulation of respiration by proprioceptor reflexes. It seems that sixty years ago even the thought had been put forward by Speck³ that the influence . . .