Claude Bernard

Biography

Claude Bernard was born in 1813 in the small village from Saint-Julien in Beaujolais. His/her father was Vigneron, which implies tenacity, the love of the ground and its fruits. His/her mother, of country stock, belonged to those which remain attached forever to their family, with their hamlet. The priest of the village, then the priests of the college of Villefranche learned to the young Claude Bernard the rudiments from the Latin and traditional humanities whose study was completed with the college of Thoissey. At 19 years, undecided on its future, he wanted to know the city. It arrives at Lyon and, required making law, it is placed as preparer at a Pharmacien. After studies in Pharmacy, it tries a career of Dramaturge, but is reorientated towards studies of Médecine. It is graduate in 1843 but fails the Agrégation the following year.

It devoted its career to the Physiologie. He was professor with the Collège de France, the Sorbonne and finally with the national Muséum of natural history.

He discovers the role of the pancreatic secretion in the digestion of greases (1848), the role of the Foie in the internal secretion of the Glucose in the Sang (1848), the induction of the Diabète by puncture on the level of the floor of the 4th ventricle (1849), the increase in the cutaneous temperature after section of the cervical nerve sympathetic nerve (1851), the production of sugar by the liver washed after excision (1855) and insulation of the Glycogène (1857), the specificity of the Curare in the neuro-muscular paralysis of junction (1856) and shows that the Monoxyde of carbon blocks breathing in the érythrocyte S (1857).

It highlighted the Homéostasie (constancy of the interior medium) towards 1860.

It is high with the row of senator in 1865, elected with the French Academy in 1868 and received the Médaille Copley in 1876. He is foreign member of the Royal Society since 1864. He is regarded as one of the principal initiators of the hypothético-deductive experimental step, often formalized - sometimes rigidified in teaching - by “OHERIC”: Observation - Assumption - Experiment - Result - Interpretation - Conclusion. It is besides a step truncated compared to that presented in the Experimental Médecine . He misses two fundamental stages there. One cannot give assumption without to have posed the problem to be solved, since an assumption is a possible answer to a question caused by an observation. The experiment tests the verifiable consequence of the assumption.

The Université of Lyon I chose to bear its name.

Titles and distinctions

Professor with the Collège de France
Professor with the Sorbonne
Professor with the national Natural history museum of natural history.
Senator in (1865)
Member of the French Academy (1868)
Medal Copley (1876)
foreign Member of the Royal Society (1864)

Quotations

“I knew the pain of the scientist who, for lack of average materials, cannot undertake to carry out experiments that it conceives and is obliged to give up certain research, or to leave his discovery to the state of outline. ”
“the theory is the checked assumption after it was subjected to the control of the reasoning and criticism. A theory, to remain good, must always change with the advance in knowledge and constantly remain subjected to the checking and the criticism of the new facts which appear. If one regarded a theory as perfect, and if one ceased checking it by the scientific experiment, it would become doctrines. ”
“the life it is death. Art is life, therefore mortal. ”
“the fixity of the interior medium is the condition of a free and independent life. ”
“It is what we already think of knowing who often prevents us from learning. ”
“When the fact that one meets does not grant with a reigning theory, it is necessary to accept the fact and to give up the theory. ”
“I do not look after the man in general, I look after the individual in particular”

Works

Introduction to the study of experimental medicine , Fields, Flammarion, ISBN 2080811371
Principles of experimental medicine , ED. PUF, 1947

It gave the results of its teaching in a succession of publications:

Lessons of experimental physiology applied to medicine , 1855
Lessons to the effects of the toxic and medicamentous powers , 1857
Lessons on physiology and the pathology of the nervous system , 1858
Lessons on the physiological properties and pathological deteriorations of the various liquids of the organization , 1859 physiological
Lessons and experiments on the nutrition and the development , 1860

It moreover published in the medical Gazette , in the Comptes-rendus of the Société of biology and of the Academy of Science, in the Revue of the Two Worlds , of the memories or articles on the uses of the pancreas, the glyconic function of the liver, the sympathetic nervous system, animal heat on the heart, the life, etc One owes him also a Rapport on progress and the walk of general physiology in France (1867).

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