Augustus Volney Waller

The heart affection which eventually proved fatal led him to seek rest, and, after staying two years longer in England, he retired first to Bruges and afterwards to Switzerland.

With renewed health, he moved to Geneva in 1868, with the purpose of practising as a physician, and he was almost immediately elected a member of the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle there.

He paid a short visit to London in the spring of 1869 to deliver the Croonian lecture before the Royal Society, and he afterwards returned to Geneva, where he died suddenly of angina pectoris on 18 September 1870.

He demonstrated the cilio-spinal centre in the spinal cord and the vasoconstrictor action of the sympathetic; and he invented the degeneration method of studying the paths of nerve impulses.

He practically rediscovered the power which the white corpuscles possess of escaping from the smallest blood-vessels, while some of his earlier work was concerned with purely physical problems.

The demonstration of the cilio-spinal centre was the result of work done jointly with Professor Budge, and is described in the ‘Comptes Rendus’ for October 1851.