Introduction

Weber was born into a family whose father was a Protestant minister. Michael Weber, himself the son of a peasant landowner, began as a preacher in Leipzig in the state of Saxony but was called to the University of Wittenberg as Professor of Dogmatics. A more complete account in English of Weber’s work on haemodynamics and on vagus inhibition will be found in Dawson. Weber discusses various aspects of this topic: it is of some historical interest that, although Brown and others had suggested that a ‘muscle sense’ existed, Weber was among the first to give it much attention in a physiological context. Weber also devotes an interesting section to a fact which has been receiving some attention recently: an object of a certain weight is perceived as pressing more heavily on the left hand than on the right. Weber’s style, both in Latin and German, tends to long sentences which sound cumbersome if translated literally into English.