The Hypnotising Polish Scientist Who Discovered Adrenaline
In this 19th-century tale of hypnosis, women’s rights and shocking experiments, Culture.pl describes Napoleon Cybulski’s road to discovering adrenaline, the ‘hormone of fight or flight’.
Napoleon Cybulski was born on 14th September 1854 in the Polish village of Krzywonosy which today lies in western Belarus. He came from a landed gentry family of average means. Already in middle school, which he attended in the city of Mińsk, it became apparent that he was academically inclined – as an outstanding student, he was awarded a silver medal. After completing middle school in 1875, Cybulski decided to study medicine at the Imperial Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg. There he studied, for instance, under the eminent Georgian physiologist Ivan Tarkhanov. In 1881, Cybulski received a doctor’s diploma cum eximia laude (with excellent praise).
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Tarkhanov describes Doctor Cybulski as an exceptionally talented, ambitious, hard-working individual who is very polite and delicate in social relations. He strongly underlines his love of truth and honesty.
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From a letter by St. Petersburg surgeon Nestor Monastyrski to the professors of the Jagellonian University, ca. 1885, trans. MK
After obtaining his diploma, Cybulski pursued physiology as Tarkhanov’s assistant. In 1884, the Pole constructed the fotohemotachometer, a clever device that allowed to measure and record the speed at which blood flows through blood vessels. Thanks to this device, he could now conduct research on blood flow speed, which earned him a doctorate in medicine in 1885.
Word of Cybulski’s talents spread through the scientific community. In view of his achievements, he was asked to take charge of the Department of Physiology, Histology and Embryology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Since this position allowed Cybulski to independently conduct scientific research, which he was very keen on, he gladly agreed.
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Kraków in the year 1899, photo: Władysław Zahorski / Polona.pl
Cybulski became head of Jagiellonian University’s Department of Physiology in the autumn of 1885. By then he was married to Julia née Rogozińska with whom he would go on to have five children. At the department, Cybulski was tasked with teaching students, but as mentioned before, he could also research various scientific issues. Cybulski had a broad range of research interests. These spanned from physiology, to electric phenomena in muscles and in the nervous system, the phenomenon of taste in the tongue, electroencephalography and even hypnosis. To find time for all these various things, Cybulski developed a very strong work ethic:
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Professor Cybulski started his lectures at 8 in the summer and at 9 in the winter. He finished them around 12. Between 3 and 5 in the afternoon, he oversaw workshops with students which were ran by his assistants. The scientific research started only at around 6. When Cybulski and Beck [one of the professor’s assistants] were researching the brain, they sometimes worked continuously until 3 in the morning. […] During a few weeks of the most intense work, Cybulski and his assistants spent 20 hours per day at the department.
Author
From the 2019 book ‘Recepta na Adrenalinę’ by Anna Mateja, trans. MK
Amidst all of this hard work, Cybulski, who back in Saint Petersburg was involved with the local School of Dentistry, also somehow managed to… practice as a dentist! He did this to provide extra money for his family.
Cybulski made a number of meaningful discoveries in the different areas that attracted his attention, but one of them definitely stands out. It’s fair to say that he’s best remembered as the co-discoverer of adrenaline.
Not for the faint-hearted
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Covers of two books by Napoleon Cybulski, photo: Polona.pl
Jagiellonian University’s Department of Physiology started on the path to discovering adrenaline in 1893 when Cybulski took an interest in animal adrenal glands. The professor wasn’t satisfied with what the scientific literature at the time had to say about these organs. Some European scientists believed, for example, that adrenal glands filter out toxins from the organism. It’s also worth adding that at the time the function of hormones (such as adrenaline), which regulate many key processes in the organism, was basically unknown. It was widely accepted that the nervous system is responsible for the physiological functions of the organism.
Cybulski knew that the blood flow in adrenal glands was too small for filtration purposes. That’s why he and his student Władysław Szymonowicz conducted a series of experiments to find out what these organs actually do. It’s worth adding that these experiments weren’t for the faint-hearted, they ended with the death of a number of dogs and other animals…
Szymonowicz cut out the adrenal glands from living dogs under anaesthesia and observed the animals’ behaviour after they woke up. The dogs emerged from their sleep apathetic and confused. Cybulski noticed that their muscles became irreversibly stiff. The animals’ blood pressure and pulse dropped and eventually the poor animals always died.
The next step was to inject into one of these glandless dogs a solution of water and an extract from the adrenal gland core:
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Less than 20 seconds after a cubic centimetre of the extract entered the bloodstream, the dog opened its eyes, looked around completely consciously, began to breathe regularly, lifted its core, and stood on its paws effortlessly… […] Its blood pressure rose and the pulse came back to normal. The miracle of the resurrection ended after a dozen or so minutes, at most after half an hour.
Author
From the 2019 book ‘Recepta na Adrenalinę’ by Anna Mateja, trans. MK
Afterwards, the scientists experimented with injecting healthy dogs with the aforementioned solution. They observed that the animals’ pulse dropped, breathing accelerated and their blood pressure rose. Thanks to all these experiments, Cybulski and Szymonowicz proved that the extract from the adrenal gland core regulates the physiology of the organism, mapping also the nature of the extract’s influence.
On 6th March 1895, Cybulski delivered a lecture about the extract and the role of adrenal glands to the Kraków Medical Society. Titled O Funkcji Nadnercza (On the Role of the Adrenal Gland), it appeared in print the same year in Warsaw. Here’s an excerpt from that lecture:
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Until now we considered the nervous system to be the most important element of a living organism, however, here we encounter a new factor, the absence of which makes the very actions of the nervous system impossible; therefore, here we notice exceptionally clearly that the organism’s functions are dependent on one another and that various organs influence each other. Through this we may be degrading the nervous system, but we get closer to a deeper understanding of the true relationships within an organism.
Cybulski called this ‘new factor’, or the extract from the adrenal gland, nadnerczyna. It was later proven that nadnerczyna contains adrenaline, but also dopamine and noradrenaline. Nevertheless, thanks to their findings, Cybulski and Szymonowicz are considered the discoverers of adrenaline (it’s worth adding that the term ‘adrenaline’ was only introduced in 1901 by the Japanese scientist Jōkichi Takamine).
What Cybulski accomplished was a major breakthrough, not only because he discovered the ‘hormone of fight or flight’ but also because he proved that, contrary to what was believed at the time, the nervous system isn’t entirely responsible for the regulatory functions of a living organism.
The sphere of the unconscious
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Hypnosis: Group of French doctors watching a colleague putting patient into trance, 1890, photo: Bettmann / Getty Images
Apart from doing pioneering research on adrenal glands, Cybulski, together with his assistant Adolf Beck, also created the first record in Poland of an animal’s brain activity. Using galvanometers, they measured the electrical activity of a macaque’s brain in response to various stimuli, such as the tickling of the animal’s paw. They wrote down the results and were eventually able to state that areas of the cerebral cortex responsible for receiving particular stimuli aren’t strictly separated but rather overlap. Cybulski and Beck published their findings in a 1896 publication titled Dalsze Badania Zjawisk Elektrycznych w Korze Mózgowej (Further Research of Electrical Phenomena in the Cerebral Cortex).
Also worth describing is Cybulski’s interest in hypnosis, which dated back to his time in Saint Petersburg. In Kraków, in the years 1886-1894, Cybulski scientifically researched this peculiar phenomenon. He conducted a series of experiments in his workshop, during which, among other things, he put two men under hypnosis using a mercury-filled glass ball on a string. Cybulski convinced one of the hypnotised subjects to… put a pair of wellington boots on his hands. It ought be added here that Cybulski did actually approach the phenomenon of hypnosis seriously, scrutinising its impact, for instance, on the circulatory and nervous systems.
Cybulski described the conclusions of his research on hypnosis in the 1894 publication Spirytyzm i Hipnotyzm? (Spiritism & Hypnotism?). He came to believe that hypnosis is a kind of neurosis. In an earlier publication, 1887’s O Hypnotyzmie ze Stanowiska Fizyjologicznego (On Hypnosis from a Physiological Standpoint), he wrote the following:
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This sphere of our unconscious, automatic activities is probably much larger than the conscious sphere. […] Elements of every thought stem from the sphere of the unconscious.
Due to such claims, some see in Cybulski a precursor of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious.
The drive towards science
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Napoleon Cybulski & Adolf Beck, photo: public domain
Thanks to his numerous accomplishments, Cybulski became a scientist of great renown. In the years 1911, 1914 and 1918 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology (though he never ultimately received this prestigious award). He was also an outstanding teacher. In the years 1904-1905, he was the rector of the Jagiellonian University.
He is credited with starting the so-called Kraków physiological school – a group of eminent scholars who developed under his tutelage. Among Cybulski’s most noted students and assistants were the aforementioned Adolf Beck who became a professor of physiology himself (at the University of Lviv), Leon Wachholz, author of important textbooks for legal medicine, and Stanisław Maziarski, expert on the structure of glands. One should also mention here Władysław Szymonowicz who, as already discussed, helped Cybulski discover adrenaline.
Apart from being an accomplished scientist and tutor, Cybulski was also concerned with social issues. He was, for example, a strong advocate of women’s education. In 1896, after longstanding efforts, together with bacteriologist Odo Bujwid he opened the first women’s middle school in Kraków. The two scientists would occasionally lecture there. Cybulski was also a supporter of allowing women to study at the Jagiellonian University – women weren’t educated there until the mid-1890s. He wrote about the issue in an 1895 article titled Z Powodu Artykułu Prof. Rydygiera ‘O Dopuszczeniu Kobiet do Studyów Lekarskich’ (In Response to Professor Rydygier’s Article ‘On Allowing Women to Study Medicine’), published in the periodical Przegląd Lekarski:
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This drive towards science as a source of moral satisfaction, which manifests itself in various forms, is a natural syndrome among fine individuals and there is, of course, no sense in assuming that it can’t arise in the minds of both women and men.
Another social issue that caught the attention of Professor Cybulski were the eating habits of the rural folk in Galicia, the Austrian partition of Poland. He conducted a survey on this issue, the results of which he published in an 1894 work titled Próba Badań nad Żywieniem Się Ludu Wiejskiego w Galicji (An Attempt at Researching the Eating Habits of Galicia’s Rural Folk). Cybulski found that the commoners living in the countryside ate very poorly and as a result were malnourished. To resolve this problem he proposed the creation of a practical ‘people’s cookbook’ that would include recipes for healthy but affordable meals. The publication had Cybulski stressing the importance of a nutritious diet by saying that ‘the health of the people is society’s and the state’s biggest asset.’
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Kraków's Napoleon Cybulski Street, photo: Google Maps
Toward the end of his life, Napoleon Cybulski turned to social philosophy, publishing, for example, the essay Nauka Wobec Wojny (The Attitude of Science Toward War) in 1918. The piece criticised ‘all cults of strength and military aspirations.’ A year later, on 26th April, Cybulski suffered a fatal stroke; only 64, he had remained the head of Jagiellonian University’s Department of Physiology up until his death.
In 1936, Cybulski was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of Poland’s highest state decorations. There’s also a street named after him in downtown Kraków. So maybe if one day, dear reader, you’ll find yourself walking down this street, you’ll feel a little adrenaline rush induced by the memory of the extraordinary scientist that was Napoleon Cybulski.
Written by Marek Kępa, Nov 2020
Source: Anna Mateja’s book ‘Recepta na Adrenalinę. Napoleon Cybulski i Krakowska Szkoła Fizjologów’, published in 2019 by Wydawnictwo Czarne
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