Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard, Physiologist. By J. M. D. Olmsted. (Cassell. iss.) ALTHOUGH he was subsequently to be overshadowed by his friend and contemporary, Pasteur, Claude Bernard was probably, during his lifetime, a far greater figure both in scientific and national estimation. And when he died in IS-8 he was the first scientist in France to receive the honour of a State funeral. The author of this book, himself a dis- tinguished American physiologist, has very worthily tried to restore him in his true perspective. Born in 1813 of small farm stock in the Canton de Villefranche, Rhone, he was educated by the village cure, the Jesuits of Villefranche, at Thoissey ; and after a brief spell in a pharmacist's shop at Lyons and a year's dabbling with play-writing, he became a medical student in Paris.
At that time experimental physiology as we know it today was scarcely existent ; and its solitary influential exponent in France was Magendie, pilloried by many people all over the world as an almost inhuman monster owing to his experiments on living animals. With his passion for exact observation and his deep distrust of easy generalisation, it was to Magendie that Bernard naturally gravitated ; and it was as Magendie's perhaps greater disciple that he became the principal founder of modern Physiology. " Why think," as he said to Weir Mitchell, " when you can experiment? Exhaust experiment and then think." The words are strangely reminiscent of our own John Hunter, the pioneer of modern surgery. Bernard, too, came under the ban of the anti-vivisectionists, of whom his own wife, unhappily for their married life, was one. But he brushed them aside for what seemed to him the larger good, although when anaesthetics were introduced he made use of them for his operations on his animals.
Probably his own greatest contributions to knowledge were the discoveries of the then unknown glycogenic function of the liver and the part played in digestion and metabolism by the pancreas. Indeed, he made the later discovery of insulin possible, and was within an ace pf discovering the underlying cause of diabetes himself. But it was as a commanding and dynamic force, a pioneer of method and approach, as the author of the famous Introduction to the Study of Experi- mental Science, as the tonic and inspiring founder of a school that was to spread all over the world, that he was to lay every branch of Medicine under the greatest debt to him.
In spite, too, of his domestic unhappiness—and he cannot have been an easy man to live with—he was the centre of a devoted throng of friends and pupils, drawn from every circle in France. He was admitted to the Legion of Honour at the age of 36 ; he succeeded Magendie as Professor of Medicine at the College de France at the age of 42. He became a foreign associate of the Royal Society of England ; and when he died —having been for a brief period a Senator—he was unchal- lengeably the greatest figure in French Medicine.
So much for his public life, but Dr. Olmsted has rendered a very great service in bringing together much new and for- gotten material and building up for us a picture of the man as he was at home, not only in Paris, but amongst the vine- yards of his own birth-place, to which he so often returned and with so much affection—a dynamic, turbulent figure, but passionately faithful to the truth as he saw it.
H. H. BAstiFoaD.
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