Paul Bert had been dead for many years when his successors erroneously coined him “father” of diving bradycardia . 

While Bert had dedicated much of his career to understanding the physiological adaptations to asphyxia, he never actually observed diving bradycardia because the endpoint of his experiments was death.

Instead, almost 100 years earlier, a simple medical student at the University of Edinburgh had observed and elegantly described  profound heart rate decelerations in animals subjected to forced water immersion. In his experiments, the heart rate completely normalized when the animals were removed from the water, thus describing the entire reflex, for the first time.

At the end of the 18th century, even the most erudite of physicians believed in the existence of death-like states known as suspended animation.

But Edmund Goodwyn (1756–1829), a mere medical student at the time, dedicated his thesis to show that suspended animation was simply the physical manifestation of extreme hypoxia.

His work helped establish the use of artificial ventilation for the treatment of asphyxia, even though many famous physicians of his time supported the use of ineffective resuscitation measures such as heat and exsanguination.

Goodwyn’s dissertation not only contains the first account of diving bradycardia, but also the first vehement refutations of claims by his contemporaries that pulmonary circulation stopped during exhalation.

A few years ago I published this article about Goodwyn’s remarkable life and work.

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