In his autobiography The Way of an Investigator, Cannon counts himself among the descendants of Jacques de Noyon, a French Canadian explorer and coureur des bois.

After graduation, Cannon was hired by William Townsend Porter at Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Physiology while continuing his digestion study.

He was a close friend of the physicist, G. W. Pierce, and together they founded the Wicht Club with other young instructors for social and professional purposes.

In 1906, Cannon succeeded Bowditch as the Higginson Professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School until 1942.

On July 19, 1901, during their honeymoon in Montana, they were the first people to reach the summit of the unclimbed southwest peak (2657 m or 8716 ft) of Goat Mountain, between Lake McDonald and Logan Pass.

The explanations of his work should enable man to live more wisely, happily, and intelligently without the interjection of supernatural interference.

Only after some time did I note that the absence of activity was accompanied by signs of perturbation, and when serenity was restored the waves promptly reappeared.

"[18] He demonstrated deglutition in a goose at the APS meeting in December 1896 and published his first paper on this research in the first issue of the American Journal of Physiology in January 1898.

However, the fact that aggressive attack and fearful escape both involve adrenaline release into the bloodstream does not imply an equivalence of “fight” with “flight” from a physiological or biochemical point of view.

He theorized that the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal gland work together as a unit to maintain homeostasis in emergencies.

[23] To identify and quantify adrenaline release during stress, beginning in about 1919 Cannon exploited an ingenious experimental setup.

Researchers in the area have come to question the validity of the notion of a unitary sympathoadrenal system, although clinicians often continue to lump together the two components.