ABSTRACT
A Cambridge physiologist John Newport Langley who more than any other person mapped out the functional neuroanatomy of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and who first proposed the concept of pharmacological receptors in 1905. Langley had examined the specific physiological functions of the three major spinal outflows and begun to use a new nomenclature to describe this system of nerves. In 1889, Langley, with the help of Dr William Lee Dickinson, turned their attention to the array of nerves that leave the length of the spinal cord and control the automated or vegetative functions of the body. The fibres of the cranial and sacral outflows passed further out into the body, where they terminated in ganglia closer to their target organs. Langley had extended his work with nicotine to the neuromuscular junction and found it also caused the skeletal muscles to contract.
