"Diagram of the more important distributions of the autonomic nervous system." From Cannon's "Bodily Changes..." (24)
The experience of having a great meal disturbed by an argument is a common one and a headache can make a work-day seem like it lasts 10 times as long. In 1915, Walter B. Cannon wrote Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage to describe the physical changes that accompany certain emotions.
Cannon begins with the idea that evolution provides a valuable starting point, not only for discussing why humans are physically the way they are but why they are emotionally the way they are. Cannon wants to push the whole process an additional step and decipher how and why physicality interacts with emotionality: “More and more it is appearing that in men of all races and in most of the higher animals, the springs of action are to be found in the influence of certain emotions which express themselves in characteristic instinctive acts.” (2)
Cannon was a physiologist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Among other fields, he studied gastrointestinal motility, the effects of emotion on the body, and adrenal secretions. All of these come up in his work on Bodily Changes which opens with a detailed discussion of the research done by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov with his famous experiments on dogs.
It seems particularly interesting that Cannon should choose to publish his work in such a field during the middle of World War I. Although America was not formally involved in the European conflict at the time, Harvard Medical School had already sent over volunteer medical staff to work in France, a fact of which Cannon cannot have been unaware as many of his colleagues, including Elliott C. Cutler and Harvey Cushing, wer involved. Immense changes in medicine and neurology were in the process of taking place based on what physicians and psychiatrists were learning from the survivors — and non-survivors — of the battlefields. Pain, hunger, fear, and rage must have been on nearly everyone’s mind and their effects on the human body would have been obvious to anyone seeing newspapers from England, France, or Germany.
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