John Call Dalton

Born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, on February 2, 1825, John Call Dalton studied at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. Early in his career he worked in Boston during a cholera epidemic, then moved into teaching and research at several medical institutions.

Dalton is widely remembered as the first full-time professor of physiology in the United States. He became known for bringing experimental demonstrations into medical teaching, and his books on physiology and anatomy helped spread that approach to a wider audience. He is also associated with important work in neurophysiology and with Topographical Anatomy of the Brain.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and later to the National Academy of Sciences. Dalton died on February 12, 1889, in California, leaving behind a reputation as one of the American physicians who helped establish physiology as a modern scientific discipline.