Half a Century of Physiology in the Medical Faculty of Novi Sad

The department of Physiology began its work in October 1961 with the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine. In the first years of its existence, the deparment encountered numerous functioning and organisational difficulties due to the limited space available on location at the time, as is often the case for newly set scientific and educational institutions. However, thanks to the efforts of competent state institutions, scientific research could eventually focus on three main issues: a) Homeostasis in the body, b) Cardio-respiratory functional systems and their adaptation to different models of weight loads (in order to investigate the influence of dosed loads on histophysiological characteristics of muscles, especially on the state of mitochondrial apparatus, researches were conducted on laboratory animals), c) The neurophysiological laboratory especially focused on changes of spontaneous bioelectric activity of different brain structures in terms of the formation of functional systems of behavior. The microelectrode technique of registration of activity of individual neurons that are part of different brain structures was used for the first time. This allowed to investigate the characteristics of individual neurons of the sea slug Aplysia depilans. In the Department of Physiology, researchers' attention was drawn to an orientation-questioning reaction, as a fundamental biological reaction. In addition to the vegetative and electroencephalographic parameters of the mentioned reaction, a special interest was allocated to the neural and neurochemical characteristics of certain brain structures during that reaction. To this end, microelectrode and microiontophoretic examinations of activity of single neurons in various structures of the brain were conducted on laboratory animals. In the middle of the 20th Century, the impact of artificial electromagnetic fields on biological systems was considered as a serious setback. This resulted in the conduction of extensive researches on the effects of these fields on biological systems.