Ernest Henry Starling CMG FRCP FRS (17 April 1866 – 2 May 1927) was a British physiologist who contributed many fundamental ideas to this subject.

These ideas were important parts of the British contribution to physiology, which at that time led the world.

But the science behind medicine—physiology—attracted him much more; he spent a long vacation in Wilhelm Kühne's laboratory in Heidelberg, studying the mechanisms of lymph formation and convinced himself that he could become a physiologist.

Guy's had no physiological laboratories, but Starling's enthusiasm changed all this, and he published nine papers on lymph and capillary function between 1893 and 1897.

Starling enjoyed collaborating with William Bayliss (1860–1924), who was on the staff of University College London (UCL), and together they published on the electrical activity of the heart and on peristalsis.

She was a great support to Starling as a sounding board, secretary, and manager of his affairs as well as mother of their four children.

Bayliss and Starling were in the newspaper's headlines when involved in the Brown Dog affair, a controversy relating to vivisection.

[5] They showed that whenever food or acid was put into the duodenum some blood-borne stimulus was released, causing the pancreas to secrete.

One of the consequences of the commission was the establishment of medical units in London teaching hospitals: clinical practice supported by laboratory research is now taken for granted in every large institution.

Starling was unaware of previous work by a German physiologist, Otto Frank, using the isolated frog heart.

As chairman of the Royal Society Food (War) Committee, he was instrumental in setting up rationing that provided needed calories and also the nutritional supplements then known.

It was used to investigate the control of blood pressure (with G. V. Anrep), the activity of insulin (with F. P. Knowlton[11]), and renal function (with E. B. Verney).

But by then the experiments had been done almost a quarter of a century before, and Johansson felt that the prize should be given for recent discoveries[citation needed].

Subsequent British Laureates (such as Gowland Hopkins and Charles Sherrington) were given the prize for work they had done twenty or thirty years before.

He was on a pleasure cruise in the West Indies, but when his ship, the Elders & Fyffes banana boat Ariguani, tied up in Kingston harbour he was found to be dead.

In the words of Henry Dale, "All had found him a generous comrade and leader, and it is impossible to think of physiology in the last thirty years without Starling as the central figure of inspiration … his courage was indomitable, his energy and his passion for knowledge flouted all restraint.