Hall, MARSHALL

Hall, MARSHALL, physician and physiologist, the son of Robert Hall, who introduced the practice of bleaching cotton with chlorine, was born at Basford, in Nottinghamshire, 18th February 1790. After studying medicine at Edinburgh (1809-14), Paris, Göttingen, and Berlin, he settled at Nottingham in 1817; and practised in London from 1826 until 1853. He died at Brighton, 11th August 1857. Though not the original observer of the phenomena of the reflex action of the spinal system, Hall claims to have been the first to show their independence of sensation, to work out the laws of their causation, and to apply the knowledge of them to the comprehension of nervous diseases. His investigations on this subject were published in two papers (1833-37). His name is also associated with a well-known method of restoring suspended respiration (see RESPIRATION, ARTIFICIAL). Besides the above-mentioned papers, he wrote several works on diagnosis (1817), the circulation (1831), The Inverse Ratio between Respiration and Irritability in the Animal Kingdom (1832), and on the nervous system and its diseases. A bibliography will be found in Memoirs of Marshall Hall, by his widow (1861).