Short answers, pulled from the story.
Physiology is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a subdiscipline of biology, it focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells and biomolecules carry out chemical and physical functions.
Jean Fernel, a French physician who lived from 1497 to 1558, introduced the term physiology. He worked during the same period as figures credited with discoveries in the circulation of the blood, including William Harvey and Ibn al-Nafis.
Galen, who lived from about 130 to 200 AD, was the first to use experiments to probe the functions of the body and is regarded as the founder of experimental physiology. Galenic physiology remained a powerful and influential tool in medicine for the next 1,400 years.
Homeostasis is the maintenance of steady states in the body and the physiological processes through which they are regulated. Claude Bernard developed the underlying concept of the milieu interieur, and American physiologist Walter B. Cannon championed it as homeostasis in 1929.
Ida Hyde was elected the first female member of the American Physiological Society in 1902. The Physiological Society admitted six women on the 3rd of July 1915: Florence Buchanan, Winifred Cullis, Ruth Skelton, Sarah C. M. Sowton, Constance Leetham Terry and Enid M. Tribe.
Physiology can be divided by the organisms studied into medical physiology, animal physiology, plant physiology, cell physiology and comparative physiology. It can also be categorized by level of organization, by the process causing physiological variation, or by the research goal, such as applied versus non-applied physiology.
Gerty Cori won in 1947 for the discovery of glycogen and the Cori cycle, and Barbara McClintock won in 1983 for genetic transposition as the only female recipient of an unshared Nobel Prize. Later laureates include Gertrude Elion in 1988, Linda B. Buck in 2004, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi in 2008 and Elizabeth Blackburn in 2009.