Physiology

After 1847, Helmholtz was only intermittently concerned with matters relating
to thermodynamics. His worknow centered on medical science, specifically the
physical foundations of physiology. He wanted to build an edifice of biophysics
on the groundworklaid by Mu¨ ller, his Berlin professor, and by his colleagues du
Bois-Reymond, Ludwig, and Bru¨ cke, of the 1847 school. Helmholtz’s rise in the
scientific and academic worlds was spectacular. For six years, he was professorof physiology at Ko¨nigsberg, and then for three years professor of physiology and
anatomy at Bonn. From Bonn he went to Heidelberg, one of the leading scientific
centers in Europe. During his thirteen years as professor of physiology at Heidelberg,
he did his most finished workin biophysics. His principal concerns were
theories of vision and hearing, and the general problem of perception. Between
1856 and 1867, he published a comprehensive workon vision, the three-volume
Treatise on Physiological Optics, and in 1863, his famous Sensations of Tone, an
equally vast memoir on hearing and music.
Helmholtz’s workon perception was greatly admired during his lifetime, but
more remarkable, for the efforts of a scientist working in a research field hardly
out of its infancy, is the respect for Helmholtz still found among those who try
to understand perception. Edward Boring, author of a modern text on sensation
and perception, dedicated his bookto Helmholtz and then explained: “If it be
objected that books should not be dedicated to the dead, the answer is that Helmholtz
is not dead. The organism can predecease its intellect, and conversely. My
dedication asserts Helmholtz’s immortality—the kind of immortality that remains
the unachievable aspiration of so many of us.”