Claude Bernard

Five centuries before him, under the Ptolemies, Egyptian experimenters had operated upon condemned persons.

so then vivisection is not as usually thought a diabolical invention of modern science in all ages the necessity has been recognized of operating upon animals that are nearest allied to man such as the monkey the hog and the dog and who share with the king of creation the privilege of eating a little of everything claude bernard however had another way of looking at things It is true that he especially made researches into the general laws of physiology, the secret of the vital functions, and the operation of the various organic systems that constitute living matter.

But his immediate object was not to furnish weapons for the art of curing.

He left to physicians and surgeons the care of drawing conclusions from his great work in biology and of acting experimentally upon animals allied to man in order to found a rational system of therapeutics.

Yes, we do sometimes oppose useless sufferings upon animals.

It is a culpable folly, a beastly cruelty, to constantly repeat barbarous experiments with the object of exhibiting a well-known physical fact, a hundred times verified and always the same, when it would only be necessary to enunciate it.

but this is not the place to expatiate upon the subject after proclaiming the utility of vivisection we give it as our opinion that the practice of it should be confined within narrow limits it is not too much to ask that it be confined to the privacy of laboratories with the exclusion of visitors and to require from students a diploma guaranteeing their knowledge and giving a program of researches to be made it is useless to seek in the living what a study of the corpse reveals in all its details And now, after these preliminary remarks, we present herewith a series of cuts representing the various apparatus used in the practice of vivisection, which are taken from a recent work by Claude Bernard.

Figure 1 shows the mode of muzzling a dog with a strong cord placed behind an iron bit.

There's an old idea in natural medicine that goes back to the 1800s, a line usually credited to a French physiologist.

His name was Claude Bernard Claude.

The microbe is nothing.

The terrain is everything.

And so every cell can be put under anesthesia.

And in fact, what was very interesting is that this very famous French physiologist Claude Bernard, he was doing experiments with animals and plants side by side with anesthetics.

And he was then concluding that his definition of life is what is living can be anesthetized, the rest is dead.

So according to Claude Bernard's definition of life, even every cell is living because it can be anesthetized.

And anesthesia is in fact a process where the membranes mostly are affected, plasma membrane, and these bioelectromagnetic fields are affected somehow.

Still no one understands how.

The introduction of the use of the microscope in clinical work widened greatly our powers of diagnosis, and we obtained thereby a very much clearer conception of the actual process of a disease.

In another way, too, medicine was greatly helped by the rise of experimental pathology, which had been introduced by John Hunter, was carried along by Magendie and others, and reached its culmination in the epic-making researches of Claude Bernard.

Not only were valuable studies made on the action of drugs, but also our knowledge of cardiac pathology was revolutionized by the work of Traube, Conheim, and others.

In no direction did the experimental method effect such a revolution as in our knowledge of the functions of the brain.

Internal Secretions.

One of the greatest contributions of the 19th century to scientific medicine was the discovery of the internal secretions of organs.

The basic work on the subject was done by Claude Bernard, a pupil of the great Magendie, whose saying it is well to remember, When entering a laboratory, one should leave theories in the cloakroom.

More than any other man of his generation, Claude Bernard appreciated the importance of experiment in practical medicine.

In the course of my life I have had some happy thoughts, says Dubois-Raymond, and I have often noted that they would come to me involuntarily, and when I was not thinking of the subject.

Claude Bernard has voiced the same thought more than once.

B. Impersonality is a deeper character than the preceding.

It reveals a power superior to the conscious individual, strange to him, although acting through him, a state which many inventors have expressed in the words, I counted for nothing in that.

In its conjectural construction, it attempts to reproduce the order and connection of things, whence its natural affinity for realistic art, which is midway between fiction and reality.

It is unifying, and so just the opposite of the aesthetic imagination, which is rather developmental.

It puts forward the master idea, Claude Bernard's idée directrice, a center of attraction and impulse that enlivens the entire work.

The principle of unity, without which no creation succeeds, is nowhere more visible than in the scientific imagination.

And I'm especially delighted this morning because we have with us Annette Ziegler.

Now, Annette Ziegler is the winner of this year's Claude Bernard Lecture.

And it's the most prestigious award that the EASD offers.

So firstly, Annette, congratulations.

But yes, it is very nice.

It's been a wonderful career.

It's a very great honour to have Claude Bernard.

And Annetta Ziegler, thank you for telling us about your life with type 1 prevention.

On your left is John Yudkin, and on the right is Ansel Keys.

Dr. Keys, as you all may know, was a physiologist who had a keen interest in nutrition.

He is who developed K-rations, thus the K of K-rations, from keys during World War II and undertook the Minnesota starvation studies at the end of the war, toward the end of the war, to determine how best to feed a starving population.

Apparently, I would say not the way he fed these men because they didn't do very well.

But Louis Pasteur, at the end of his life, realized and he confessed that he had wasted his life on the wrong study.

His contemporary down the road, Claude Bernard, taught physical vitalism.

It was a health of the interior workings of the body that determined whether disease would grow or not.

And Louis Pasteur's one of his dying statement was a germ is nothing.

The soil is everything, referring to Claude Bernard's

work.

Interesting.