Concept
John Scott Haldane
Overview
John Scott Haldane (; 2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936) was a Scottish physician physiologist and philosopher famous for his often-dangerous self-experimentation that led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also experimented on his son, the celebrated and polymathic biologist J. B. S. Haldane, even when he was quite young. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body.
Haldane visited the scenes of many mining disasters and investigated their causes. When the Germans used poison gas in World War I, Haldane went to the front at the request of Lord Kitchener and attempted to identify the gases being used. One outcome of this was his invention of a respirator, known as the black veil.
Haldane's investigations into decompression sickness resulted in the concept of staged decompression, and the first reasonably reliable decompression tables, and his mathematical model is still used in highly modified forms for computing decompression schedules.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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In chemical experiments on metals, however, there are some others worthy of notice, but the greatest abundance (where the whole are so few in numbers) is discovered in certain medicines, which, from their occult and specific qualities (as they are termed), affect particular limbs, humors, diseases, or constitutions. Nor should we omit the harmony between the motion and phenomena of the moon, and their effects on…
Francis Bacon, Novum organum
States what John Scott Haldane is.
All depends on observing the early stages of the derangement; which, unfortunately, are of necessity the least marked. If, however, the organs and functions not disturbed in the first instance, become affected in a fixed order of succession, some light is thereby thrown upon the action which one organ exercises over another: and we occasionally obtain a series of effects which we can refer with some confidence to…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what John Scott Haldane is.
To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what John Scott Haldane is.
Related ideas
- Iran
- Royal Medal
- Oxford
- Reader (academic rank)
- University of Glasgow
- World War I
- Royal Society
- J. B. S. Haldane
- Edinburgh
Place in the tradition
Part of Vitalism.