Claude Bernard | French Physiologist | 1813-1878
“Reasoning is always the same, whether in the sciences that study living beings or in those concerned with inorganic bodies. But each kind of science presents different phenomena and complexities and difficulties of investigation peculiarly its own. As we shall later see, this makes the principles of experimentation incomparably harder to apply to medicine and the phenomena of living bodies than to physics and the phenomena of inorganic bodies.
Reasoning will always be correct when applied to accurate notions and precise facts; but it can lead only to error when the notions or facts on which it rests were originally tainted with error or inaccuracy. That is why experimentation, or the art of securing rigorous and well-defined experiments, is the practical basis and, in a way, the executive branch of the experimental method as applied to medicine. If we mean to build up the biological sciences, and to study fruitfully the complex phenomena which occur in living beings, whether in the physiological or the pathological state, we must first of all lay down principles of experimentation, and then apply them to physiology, pathology and therapeutics. Experimentation is undeniably harder in medicine than in any other science; but for that very reason, it was never so necessary, and indeed so indispensable.
The more complex the science, the more essential is it, in fact, to establish a good experimental standard, so as to secure comparable facts, free from sources of error. Nothing, I believe, is to-day so important to the progress of medicine.
To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.”
An introduction to the study of experimental medicine / Translated by H.C. Greene by Bernard, Claude; University College, London. Library Services/ Published 1865. Source archive.org
Credit: Wellcome Library, London,L0006244
Claude Bernard and his pupils. Oil painting after Léon-Augustin Lhermitte via Wikipedia Commons
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Thumbnail Image: Memorial plaque in Paris marking the site of Claude Bernard's laboratory from 1847 until his death in 1878, via Wikipedia Commons by Jebulon, Public Domain under CC0 1.0