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Respiratory Physiology pp 3–46Cite as

The Structural Basis of Lung Function

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Abstract

In the spring of 1966 I moved to Berne, Switzerland, to take over a somewhat rundown department of anatomy at the University of Berne. I inspected the old building that housed, on the upper floor, an enormous collection of skeletons of birds and mammals of all sizes, from shrews to elephants and whales. In this monumental museum I was struck by a small glass showcase that contained a collection of ancient casts of bronchial trees. These were the original preparations of Christoph Theodor Aeby, the raw material on which he had based his monograph “Der Bronchialbaum der Säugethiere and des Menschen” (1), published in 1880. This volume was well known to me because, a few years earlier, I had studied the human bronchial tree extensively. Aeby’s book was the first reference in the bibliography of my Morphometry of Human Lung (1961), not only because I arranged my references alphabetically but because Aeby pioneered the work I had undertaken.

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  1. Ewald R. Weibel
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  1. Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    John B. West

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© 1996 American Physiological Society

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Weibel, E.R. (1996). The Structural Basis of Lung Function. In: West, J.B. (eds) Respiratory Physiology. People and Ideas. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7520-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7520-0_1

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