On this date in 1877, the American Physiological Society was formed in Boston, and later that year met at the Physiological Laboratory of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, New York City, to organize further. Five scientists, four of them physicians, banded together to form APS at a time when few physiological laboratories and even fewer physiologists existed in the United States. The five founders (Henry Pickering Bowditch, S. Weir Mitchell, Henry Newell Martin, Russell H. Chittenden and John Green Curtis) were all researchers who had separately studied cardiac muscle, the knee-jerk response, the cerebellum’s function and nutrition, among other physiological and medical questions.

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