Henderson, Lawrence Joseph

(b. Lynn, Massachusetts, 3 June 1878; d. Boston, Massachusetts, 10 February 1942)

biochemistry, physiology.

Henderson was the son of Joseph Henderson, a businessman, and Mary Reed Bosworth. He received his early education in the Salem, Massachusetts, public schools and entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen. Attracted to the study of chemistry, he was especially influenced by T. W. Richards, who taught physical chemistry. Henderson became interested in the application of physicochemical methods and principles to biochemistry, and upon graduating from college in 1898 he entered the Harvard Medical School to obtain training in the biological sciences. After receiving his M.D. in 1902, Henderson spent two years in the laboratory of the biochemist Franz Hofmeister in Strasbourg. When he returned to the United States in the fall of 1904, he went to work in Richards’ laboratory at Harvard. The two men became brothers-in-law in 1910 when Henderson married the sister of Richards’ wife.

In 1905 Henderson was appointed lecturer in biochemistry at Harvard, where he continued to teach until his death. His contributions to the university during his career were many and varied. He was instrumental in the founding of the department of physical chemistry in the medical school (1920), the fatigue laboratory in the Graduate School of Business Administration (1927), and the Society of Fellows (1932). The first course at Harvard dealing with the history of the sciences in general was offered by Henderson beginning in 1911. He was also largely responsible for bringing George Sarton to Cambridge in 1916. Among the honors that Henderson received were membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the French Legion of Honor.

A stout man with a red beard (which earned him the nickname of “Pink Whiskers”), Henderson loved good food and French wines. In conversation he could be quite forceful and enjoyed making dogmatic statements that stimulated his audience to respond. The code of behavior of the respectable, hard-working, thrifty Yankee guided his conduct throughout his life. In his scientific work, his strength lay in the interpretation of data and in the discovery of uniformities and generalizations. He was not a proficient experimenter, and he disliked the manipulation of complicated apparatus.

Henderson’s broad outlook led him to write on philosophy and sociology as well as science. In spite of the diversity of his interests, however, his work, in retrospect, exhibits a fundamental unity. There is a marked consistency in his approach to the various fields that he studied. During the course of his research, he became impressed with the need for studying the interaction between the variables of a system and with the apparent orderliness of certain systems. His career was largely devoted to the study of the organization of the organism, the universe, and society. The emphasis in his work was always on the importance of examining whole systems.

Henderson reflected as well as contributed to an organismic, holistic trend which played an important role in the thought of the early twentieth century. The character of this trend is exemplified by such philosophies as Alfred North Whitehead’s organic mechanism, Jan Smuts’s holism, and the theory of emergent evolution as expounded by C. Lloyd Morgan. Organismic and holistic influences entered the social and natural sciences through the development of the functionalist school in anthropology, the gestalt theory in psychology, and organismic biology.

In his early work Henderson applied his knowledge of physical chemistry to the problem of acid-base equilibrium in the body. It was then known that the body fluids are excellent buffers, that is, they resist changes in acidity or basicity, and that this buffering ability depends upon the presence of weak acids (or bases) and their salts. Henderson derived an equation which allowed him to describe quantitatively the action of buffer solutions. The equation, published in 1908, states that

where (H⁺) represents the hydrogen ion concentration and k represents the dissociation constant of the weak acid. This equation was converted into logarithmic form by the Danish biochemist K. A. Hasselbalch in 1916 and is now known as the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. Although only approximately true, it still remains the most useful mathematical device for treating problems dealing with buffer solutions.

Henderson’s equation made it clear that a weak acid and its salt act most effectively as a buffer at a hydrogen ion concentration equal to the acid’s dissociation constant. This fact explains why carbonic acid and monosodium phosphate, along with their salts, act so efficiently in preserving the approximate neutrality of the body. These acids have dissociation constants of about 10^-7 moles per liter, which means that they serve as excellent buffers for blood and many other physiological fluids, in which the hydrogen ion concentration is close to the same number of moles per liter.

This work greatly impressed Henderson with the “fitness” of substances like carbonic acid for various physiological processes. At about this time (1908), he became friendly with Josiah Royce and began to attend his philosophy seminars at Harvard. With Henderson’s interest in philosophical problems thus stimulated, he proceeded to speculate further concerning the fitness of the inorganic environment to support life. In two books, The Fitness of the Environment (1913) and The Order of Nature (1917), he concluded that the properties of carbon dioxide, water, and carbon compounds (which he considered to be the chief constituents of the environment as far as the organism is concerned) and the properties of the elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen uniquely favor the evolution of complex physicochemical systems such as living beings. He could not believe that this correspondence between the properties of matter and energy and the characteristics of physicochemical systems could be due to chance. He concluded that a kind of order, or teleology, exists in nature and that the origin of this order cannot be explained in mechanistic terms. The universe has to be viewed from two complementary points of view, mechanism and “teleology” (a word which Henderson used to denote order or harmonious unity rather than design or purpose).

As an agnostic, Henderson did not draw any religious or theological conclusions from his consideration of fitness. J. D. Bernal has pointed out that facts cited by Henderson can be taken as evidence that life has to make do with what it has or it would not be here at all, rather than as an indication of some master plan in nature. Henderson’s lasting contribution was to make it clear that the inorganic world has placed certain restrictions on the direction that organic evolution can take.

While he was speculating on the order of nature, Henderson was also considering the organization of the body. His studies on the complex buffer systems of the organism and on acidosis contributed greatly to the understanding of these subjects and served to focus his attention on the pattern or order of the organism. According to Henderson, the organism, like nature, had to be considered from two points of view, namely mechanism and organization. The structures and processes of the living being, which are the things that are organized, are in themselves mechanical. The concept of organization, however, is not mechanical but is a rational and teleological relationship between these parts and processes.

As far as the physiologist is concerned, Henderson felt, the investigation of biological organization basically meant the elucidation of the regulatory processes of the body, for example, the mechanisms regulating the acid-base balance which he had elaborated. In this connection, he later came to see Claude Bernard’s theory of the constancy of the internal environment as an important and concrete expression of biological organization.

Henderson believed that the concept of organization taught the biologist to recognize the wholeness of the organism and the interdependence of its parts and processes. When he began his study of blood in 1919, he was convinced that every one of the variables involved in the respiratory changes of blood must be a mathematical function of all the others. As data was collected in his laboratory on the relations between the various components of blood, such as the carbon dioxide tension and oxygen, Henderson searched for a graphic device to describe the interrelations between a number of variables. Quite accidentally he stumbled upon the Cartesian nomogram, which is essentially a complex graph made by superimposing two or more simpler graphs.

He began with five experimentally determined equations involving the seven variables which he felt were necessary to explain the respiratory activity of blood. Each of these equations was expressed in terms of two independent variables, free oxygen and free carbon dioxide. A two-dimensional graph can be plotted for each of these equations, and these graphs can be combined into one figure since they all have the same Cartesian coordinates. This technique allowed him to represent all seven variables in one diagram. Each point on the nomogram has seven coordinates, so that if the value of any two variables is known, the values of the other five can be read off the chart. Henderson later learned how to transform these complex nomograms into the type of alignment chart invented by P. M. D’Ocagne, which was much easier to read. After Henderson introduced the nomogram into biology, it proved to be a useful tool for facilitating the visualization of relations between several variables, as well as for saving a great deal of computation. His description of the blood as a physicochemical system was summarized in his classic book Blood: A Study in General Physiology (1928).

While Henderson was writing this work, his colleague William Morton Wheeler introduced him to Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di sociolgia generate (1916). Henderson was very much impressed by the attempt of this Italian engineer-turned-social scientist to apply the methods of the physical sciences to sociology. Pareto’s treatment of society as a system in dynamic equilibrium, similar to the organism, appealed to Henderson, who believed that society, like the body, is an organized system which possesses regulatory processes that tend to stabilize it. This doctrine, which he taught in his sociology course at Harvard, influenced the thought of such men as George Homans, Talcott Parsons, and Crane Brinton.

In his later years, particularly after reading Pareto, Henderson grew increasingly skeptical of metaphysics and came to regret the tone of certain parts of his earlier works. Although he never rejected the concept of fitness, he felt that the philosophical speculations which he had derived from this notion were meaningless. He preferred to regard the apparent existence of fitness as a basic but inexplicable fact and to speculate no further on the subject. He became fully convinced that science is only approximate, not absolute. All metaphysical statements, such as “the external world really exists,” he considered nonlogical and hence meaningless for science. Conceptual schemes are used because they are convenient, but they cannot be proven true or false in the sense of facts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A good bibliography of Henderson’s published works, with about 125 entries, is Walter Cannon, “Lawrence Joseph Henderson, 1878–1942,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 23 (1943), 52–58. A number of items missing from the Cannon bibliography are listed in J. Parascandola, “Lawrence J. Henderson and the Concept of Organized Systems” (diss., Univ. of Wis., 1968), pp. 233–238.

Henderson’s major books are The Fitness of the Environment (New York, 1913); The Order of Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1917); Blood: A Stitch in General Physiology (New Haven, 1928); and Pareto’s General Sociology: A Physiologist’s Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). For a selection of his sociological writings, see On the Social System, Bernard Barber, ed. (Chicago, 1970).

His most important articles on the regulation of neutrality include “Concerning the Relationship Between the Strength of Acids and Their Capacity to Preserve Neutrality,” in American Journal of Physiology, 21 (1908), 173–179; and “The Theory of Neutrality Regulation in the Animal Organism” ibid. 427–448. A classic review article on the whole subject of the acid-base equilibrium is “Das Gleichgewicht zwischen Basen und Saôurcn im tierischen Organismus,” in Ergebnisse der Physiologie8 (1909), 254–325, The researches of Henderson and his co-workers, on blood, summarized to a large extent in the 1928 work cited above, originally appeared in a series of ten articles bearing the general title “Blood as a Physiochemical System,” in Journal of Biological Chemistry, 46–90 (1921–1931).

Harvard University possesses a rich collection of MS material belonging to Henderson, including correspondence, notebooks, unpublished lectures, and an unpublished autobiographical work entitled “Memories.” For a description of this collection, see J. Parascandola, “Notes on Source Material: The L. J. Henderson Papers at Harvard,” in Journal for the History of Biology, 4 (1971), 115–118.

II. Secondary Literature. The only monographlength study on Henderson is the author’s unpublished Ph.D. diss, cited above. A fairly lengthy article on Henderson’s scientific work and philosophical views is J. Parascandola, “Organismic and Holistic Concepts in the Thought of L. J. Henderson,” in Journal for the History of Biology, 4 (1971), 63–113.

The most substantial of the obituary notices is the Cannon article cited above, pp. 31–58. There are a number of more recent short biographical sketches, including Dickinson T W. Richards, “Lawrence Joseph Henderson,” in Physiologist, 1 no. 3 (1958), 32–37; J. H. T. [John H. Talbott], “Lawrence Joseph Henderson (1878–1942), Natural Philosopher,” in Journal of the American Medical Association, 198 (1966), 1304–1306; and Jean Mayer, “Lawrence J. Henderson—A Biographical Sketch,” in Journal of Nutrition, 94 (1965), 1–5. See also John Edsall’s excellent article in Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement III). A fine account of Henderson’s personality is Crane Brinton, “Lawrence Joseph Henderson, 1878–1942,” in E. W. Forbes and J. H. Finlay, eds., The Saturday Club: A Century Completed, 1920–1956 (Boston, 1958), pp. 207–214. ‘

Henderson’s role in the founding of the Harvard fatigue laboratory is described by D. Bruce Dill, “The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory: Its Development, Contributions, and Demise,” in Circulation Research, 20–21 , Supplement I (March 1967), 1–161–1–170. His views on sociology and their influence were treated at some length in Cynthia Russett, The Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought (New Haven, 1966). For a discussion of the influence of Henderson’s views on fitness, see George Wald, “Introduction,” in The Fitness of the Environment (Boston, 1958), and Harold Blum, Time’s Arrow and Evolution (Princeton, 1955),

On his work with buffers, see J. Parascandola, “L. J. Henderson and the Theory of Buffer Action,” in Medizinhistorisches Journal, 6, 297–309. Henderson’s part in the founding of the Society of Fellows is described in George Homans and O. T. Bailey, “The Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1933–1947,” in Crane Brinton, ed., The Society of Fellows (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 1–37.

John Parascandola