sited England, where his zeal in dissecting brought him under
suspicion of grave-robbery, which suspicion made it expedient for him to
return to the Continent. After studying botany in Basel for some time he
made an extended botanical journey through Switzerland, finally settling
in his native city, Berne, as a practising physician. During this time
he did not neglect either poetry or botany, publishing anonymously a
collection of poems.

In 1736 he was called to Gottingen as professor of anatomy, surgery,
chemistry, and botany. During his labors in the university he never
neglected his literary work, sometimes living and sleeping for days and
nights together in his library, eating his meals while delving in his
books, and sleeping only when actually compelled to do so by fatigue.
During all this time he was in correspondence with savants from all over
the world, and it is said of him that he never left a letter of any kind
unanswered.

Haller's greatest contribution to medical science was his famous
doctrine of irritability, which has given him the name of "father of
modern nervous physiology," just as Harvey is called "the father of
the modern physiology of the blood." It has been said of this
famous doctrine of irritability that "it moved all the minds of the
century--and not in the departments of medicine alone--in a way of which
we of the present day have no satisfactory conception, unless we compare
it with our modern Darwinism."(1)

The principle of general irritability had been laid down by Francis
Glisson (1597-1677) from deductive studies, but Haller proved by
experiments along the line of inductive methods that this irritability
was not common to all "fibre as well as to the fluids of the body," but
something entirely special, and peculiar only to muscular substance. He
distinguished between irritability of muscles and sensibility of nerves.
In 1747 he gave as the three forces that produce muscular movements:
elasticity, or "dead nervous force"; irritability, or "innate nervous
force"; and nervous force in itself. And in 1752 he described one
hundred and ninety experiments for determining what parts of the body
possess "irritability"--that is, the property of contracting when
stimulated. His conclusion that this irritability exists in muscular
substance alone and is quite independent of the nerves proceeding to it
aroused a controversy that was never definitely settled until late in
the nineteenth century,