Ernest Henry Starling, His Predecessors, and the “Law of the Heart”

Abstract

T he discovery that end-diastolic volume regulates the work of the heart is generally credited to Ernest Henry Starling, who described this relationship in a series of papers between 1912 and 1914 [1][2][3][4] and in his Linacre Lecture, which was given at Cambridge University in 1915 and published in 1918.5 In these papers, Starling and his collaborators acknowledge that they were not the first to describe this relationship 6 ; they cite the work of Blix 7 and Evans and Hill 8 on the length-dependence of energy release by skeletal muscle, Frank's 1895 description of the influence of diastolic volume on the work of the frog ventricle, 9 and contemporary descriptions in canine 10 and feline hearts.11 The present article reviews evidence that what we now call "Starling's Law of the Heart" or "The Frank-Starling Relationship" was widely appreciated by late 19th century physiologists.

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