Corneille Heymans

Corneille Jean Francois Heymans was a Belgian physiologist who lived from 1892 to 1968. He studied at the Jesuit College of Saint Barbara and at Ghent University, where he took his doctorate in 1920, then worked in Paris, Lausanne, Vienna, London and Cleveland before returning to Ghent. In 1930 he succeeded his father as Professor of Pharmacology and head of the department there. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing that blood pressure and the oxygen content of the blood are sensed by the body and signalled to the brain through nerves, using cross-perfusion experiments on dogs that revealed the role of peripheral chemoreceptors in respiratory regulation. He edited the Archives Internationales de Pharmacodynamie et de Therapie for many years.