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Wondering by what kind of lecture I could best show my gratitude to the Royal Society of Medicine for the great honour bestowed upon me, I finally decided that the subject at least had to be of some clinical interest and not be too exclusively theoretical. It would also have to have some connexion with the work of Sir Charles Sherrington. He could not to be sure in his old age begin studying the behaviour of individual muscle spindles but his extensive early work on postural tone and that with Liddell on the stretch reflex (Liddell & Sherrington 1924, 1925) had set the snowball in motion. Growth and expansion in this field has since been largely concerned with the functional role of the muscle spindles, which has not been easy to understand and even today cannot be regarded as fully understood. Partly this is because any interpretation of function going beyond the barest outline of description always involves speculation in advance of available evidence; partly, mirabile dictu, also to some extent because of Sherrington's authority. The latter statement may seem odd but the truth is that synthetic experimenters of Sherrington's order of magnitude influence the next generation to such an extent that it finds it difficult to cast adrift from them and start navigating its own vessels. Yet this is what one must do and Sherrington would have been the first to admit it. His many contributions to muscle sense and the stretch reflex, based on myography and the use of extensors in the decerebrate preparation, were in fact so well synthesized that there did not seem to be any room left for the efferent control of the muscle spindles which was the missing link that did not seem to be missing. Let us summarize his standpoint: The decerebrate preparation gave a good stretch reflex from (at the time unknown) muscle receptors. This was described as exaggerated standing. Its basis was a 'release' of the extensor motoneurones, the alpha motoneurones as we tend to call them today. The stretch reflex disappeared when the afferent nerves were cut and so the basis of postural tone was an autogenetic facilitation of the stretch reflex from muscular afferents. The impulses arose from a muscle and influenced its own motoneurones; hence 'autogenetic'.

The Functional Role of the Muscle Spindle's Primary end Organs