Photo of Sir Michael Foster, British physiologist

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Sir Michael Foster (1836-1907), the British physiologist. Foster, the son of a surgeon, gained his MD from University College, London, in 1859. He worked as a doctor but later moved to Cambridge University where he became professor of physiology in 1883. He did much to establish physiology as a major scientific discipline. He pressed for the construction of new laboratories, he produced a textbook of physiology, and he founded the Physio-logical Society and the Journal of Physiology. His research was mostly in the field of genesis of the heartbeat, and from his experiments he concluded that the cause of the heartbeat was a "peculiar property of general cardiac tissue".

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