Great Nanjingers (21

Image courtesy Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

Great Nanjingers (21) Neuroscientist & Son of Presbyterian Missionaries;

Theodore Holmes Bullock

By Frank Hossack

Theodore Holmes Bullock was to become a founding father of that interdisciplinary science combining neuroscience and ethology into Neuroethology. As a child, he had also once had Sun Yat-sen himself as a guest in his home.

Born in Nanjing on 16 May, 1915, Bullock was second of four children to Presbyterian missionary parents, Amasa Archibald Bullock and Ruth Beckwith. Returning to his parents home in the USA, a cousin got him interested in shell collecting. This was to be his calling.

A celebrated neuroscientist, amongst Bullock’s work across all major animal groups was that on Crotalinae, which led to the discovery of the snake’s thermal imaging capabilities via their pit organs.

But for us, this Great Nanjinger is of interest for the time he and his family spent in various parts of China. Writing in his autobiography, Bullock explains that his parents had come to China in 1909. It was their honeymoon, a seemingly odd choice explained by the fact Bullock’s father had a few years prior spent a year in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, teaching chemistry, which had been his major as a student at University of California, Berkeley. Bullock writes that there his father, “fell in love with

the people, their eagerness to listen, and their respect for learning”.

This fired up the young Amasa, to the extent that he started to see China’s experimenting with western-style education as his niche, especially teacher training. Therefore, with his time in Chengdu at an end, he returned to the USA, to Chicago where he took a master's degree in education. This was to pave the pay for his life’s turning point and many more trips to China.

Undertaking advanced work in psychology at Columbia with esteemed American psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike, Amasa had a roommate with a sister readying herself to be a missionary with the Hartford Theological Seminary.

Nature took its course and before long the new couple were back in China, where Amasa joined the faculty of Liangjiang Normal College, now Nanjing University, to assist with the formation of its teachertraining school. It was during this time that the family home was visited by Sun Yat-sen.

Bullock writes that most of his childhood memories were centred on their latter home in Wuchang, one of the three cities which were merged to become today’s Wuhan.

Returning to Wuhan in 1980, Bullock was delighted to successfully find the old family home, and that it had been turned into a preschool.

Long before that though, the Bullock family had made many return trips to the USA.

Christmas of 1926 was spent in the home of Bullock’s cousin, Mary Beckwith, and this was the point of no return. Having ignited his interest in anthropology, Bullock writes, “Back in central China I continued to

collect freshwater and terrestrial shells in kitchen middens and on ivy-covered walls. “To identify my prizes I took them to the museum in the British Concession in Shanghai.”

The rest, as they say…. Bullock fathered two children with Martha Runquist, who remained his wife for 68 years, until this Great Nanjinger passed away on 20 December, 2005.