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MARSHALL HALL (1790-1857)

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Originally appearing in Volume V12, Page 849 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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MARSHALL HALL (1790-1857)  ,
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English physiologist, was born on the 18th of
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February 1790, at Basford, near Nottingham, where his
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father, Robert Hall, was a cotton manufacturer . Having attended the Rev . J . Blanchard's academy at Notting-
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ham, he entered a chemist's
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shop at Newark, and in 18o9 began to study
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medicine at
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Edinburgh University . In 1811 he was elected senior president of the Royal Medical Society; the following
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year he took the M.D. degree, and was immediately appointed
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resident house physician to the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh . This appointment he resigned after two years, when he visited Paris and its medical
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schools, and, on a walking 1 The tomb of
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Sir John Beauchamp (d . 1358) in old St Paul's was commonly known, in error, as that of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester . " To dine with Duke Humphrey " was to go hungry among the debtors and beggars who frequented " Duke Humphrey's Walk " in the
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cathedral tour, those also of Berlin and
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Gottingen . In 1817, when he settled at Nottingham, he published his Diagnosis, and in 1818 he wrote the Mimoses, a
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work on the affections denominated bilious,
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nervous, &c . The next year he was elected a
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fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1825 he became physician to the Nottingham general hospital . In 1826 he removed to
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London, and in the following year he published his Commentaries on the more important diseases of
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females . In 183o he issued his Observations on
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Blood-letting, founded on researches on the morbid and curative effects of loss of blood, which were acknowledged by the medical profession to be of vast
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practical value, and in 1831 his Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood in the Capillary Vessels, in which he showed that the blood-channels intermediate between arteries and
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veins serve the office of bringing the fluid blood into contact with the material tissues, of the
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system .

In the following year he read before the Royal Society a

paper " On the inverse ratio which subsists between Respiration and Irritability in the Animal
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Kingdom." His most important work in physiology was concerned with the theory of reflex
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action, embodied in a paper " On the reflex
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Function of the Medulla Oblongata and the Medulla Spinalis (1832), which was supplemented in 1837 by another" On the True
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Spinal Marrow, and the Excito-motor System of Nerves." The " reflex function " excited
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great attention on the continent of
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Europe, though in England some of his papers were refused publication by the Royal Society . Hall thus became the authority on the multiform deranged states of
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health referable to an abnormal condition of the nervous system, and he gained a large practice . His " ready method " for resuscitation in drowning and other forms of suspended respiration has been the means of saving innumerable lives . He died at
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Brighton of a throat affection, aggravated by lecturing, on the 11th of August 1857 . A list of his
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works and details of his " ready method," &c., are given in his
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Memoirs by his widow (London, 1861) .

End of Article: MARSHALL HALL (1790-1857)
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ROBERT HALL (1764-1831)

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