Walter Bradford Cannon

The scientific literature on hoodoo is partly a history of how black belief was turned into pathology.

Walter Cannon's 1942 paper on voodoo death proposed that the conviction of doom could kill through prolonged sympathetic adrenal arousal, building its case from reports gathered largely in South America, Africa, Australia and the Pacific rather than the American South.

Later stress research broadly supported his ideology as well.

Clinicians from the 1960s reported patients who attributed their illness to root work.

Are there any final things you want to say or things you maybe didn't cover? Final kind of thoughts as we wrap this section up.

Jason, as I think about the world when I started in the 1970s, you know, we were still in an era of mass sympathetic discharge and vagal withdrawal and this sort of Walter B. Cannon fight or flight, uh, paradigm.

And what happened, starting with Gunnar Wallin and, and the group in Scandinavia and other colleagues, they started to see the sympathetic nervous system and, and, and also parasympathetic nervous system as m- much more discretely regulated.

And that occurred both in terrific human studies that they did, and later the group in Iowa with Ron Victor and, and later Doug Seals as he moved to Arizona and then Colorado.

That, for example, you feel sad because you are crying, or you're scared because you're shaken like a This idea was also proposed by Danish psychologist Carl Lange, and so this concept that physiological arousal precedes emotion is called the James Lange theory.

But American physiologist Walter Cannon wasn't feeling it.

He thought that too many of the body's reactions were too similar.

A racing heart, fluttering stomach, and sweaty hands could be attributed to passion, fear, excitement, or anger.

Cybernetics, too, introduced an idiosyncratic vocabulary to describe organism-level regulation in the most general terms that also apply to systems beyond the biological.

The roots of cybernetic ideas can be traced to Walter Cannon, who coined the term homeostasis in 1926, referring to the ability of an organism to maintain its healthy physiological state in the face of environmental perturbations.

In the language of cybernetics, homeostatic regulation can be expressed as a problem of feedback, taking into account the information about the difference between the current and the target state of the organism, and then using that to move closer to a desired state.

In 1943, the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, co-authored a landmark paper titled Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.

Yeah.

Walter Cannon's observations during World War I are a prime example of that.

Right.

Cannon effectively documented the core tenets of modern damage control resuscitation right there on the battlefield.

That is the modern DCR paradigm in a nutshell.

Which leaves us with a final provocation to evaluate before your next trauma shift.

We have analyzed the historical arc from O'Shaughnessy's deficient saline to Canon's ignored warnings through the devastating hydrostatic loads of the Shires era.

And finally, arriving at low titer, whole blood, and precision permissive hypotension.

And then it's like, oh, man, now I'm now my body's having a chemical physiological response.

So I actually get in a low level or a higher level fight or flight, which Dr. Walter Cannon coined.

Right now, how do I get back to homeostasis? How do I relax again? And you've got to take care of your body.

You've got to be social.

It's gone, but it's still in the body.

Further validation is pioneering physician Dr. Walter Cannon established that the principle of biological homeostasis.

What is biological homeostasis? What is that? It's the, it's the human body is kind of hardwired to kind of maintain a familiar internal baseline.

It's like a thermostat.

It missed the problem of speed and specificity.

By the 1920s, physiologists like Walter Cannon and Philip Bard pointed out a glaring flaw in James's logic.

Our internal organs are actually relatively insensitive and our autonomic nervous system is slow.

Like too slow to save us from a bear.