Forwell George D.

2018-09-13T15:55:10Z

2018-09-13T15:55:10Z

1952

Claude Bernard is famed for his discoveries and for his writings, rather than for his merit as a teacher. In comparing him with Pasteur, Tzanck (1933) says "Bernard n'a créé ni école, ni caste, et craignant par avance les cadres trop rigides, it répétait sans cesse á ses élves: 'Démolissez -moi, mais créez "'. The French pupils of Bernard provided little more than technical. assistance to their master. The famous painting by Lhermitte demonstrates how the "disciples" are merely engaged in experimental details to which they have delegated themselves. How different from the establishments of the German physiologists - especially that of Ludwig, whom Franklin (19+9) calls "the greatest physiological teacher of all time ". In Ludwig's laboratory the experiments going on simultaneously were singular in their diversity. Bernard, himself, would doubtless have laid the responsibility for the failure of his French pupils at the door of the French treasury. Samson Wright (1939) is in agreement with this view and states that lack of money and space were the fundamental obstacles which prevented Bernard from giving his country world leadership in his subject in his own generation. During Bernard's lifetime - by 1860 (Osier, 1891) - Germany had become the centre of the medical world. However, a German pupil of Bernard became a scientist of first rank: though Kühne was also a pupil of Virchow and of Helmholtz, the major part of his work - that concerning the intermediate products of digestion - shows the influence of his French teacher. The position of Kühne is important in that, in addition to his own work, his pupil Chittenden founded the first definite laboratory of physiological physiological chemistry in the New World at the Sheffield School of Science of Yale University. The Yale laboratory became the centre for the spread of physiological chemistry in the United States (Castiglioni, 191+7).

In tracing the concept of "milieu intérieur" up to the present time, one realises that the possibilities and implications of at least one of Bernard's ideas are still being recognised. As Henderson (1928) says, "Claude Bernard, when he died fifty years ago, left behind a program for the new science that he himself had gone far to carry out ". The attempts of J.L. Faure (1925) and of Pierre Mauriac (1927) to deify the spectacular Louis Pasteur at the expense of Claude Bernard are nullified by A.W. Franklin's eulogy (1928): "He was neither burned at the stake like Servetus, nor left to die unknown like Mayow; his discoveries neither revolutionised science like Harvey's circulation, nor hindered progress like Stahl's phlogiston. He lived a simple life, of fixed purpose, some- times a general sometimes a humble warrior in the army of science, always filled with a sublime faith in its power to benefit humanity, seeking for himself nothing, for the world the truth which never perishes."

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/32205

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2018 Block 20

Claude Bernard, and his views on medical research

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy