Bernard

Bernard, CLAUDE, a great French physiologist, born at Saint-Julien, near Villefranche, 12th July 1813. He studied medicine at Paris, became a hospital-surgeon in 1839, and two years later assistant at the Collège de France to the great physiologist Magendie, with whom he worked for thirteen years, until his own appointment in February 1854 to the chair of General Physiology. The same year he was chosen member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1855 he succeeded to Magendie's chair of Experimental Physiology. Bernard was elected to the Academy in 1869, and died at Paris, February 10, 1878. His funeral was conducted at the public expense, an honour never before given to a man of science, and his éloge at the Academy fell to Renan. As an original investigator, Bernard stands among the foremost of the century. His earliest researches were devoted to the physiological action of the various secretions of the alimentary canal. His proof that the sole use of the pancreatic juice in the digestive system is so to modify the ingested fats as to render them capable of being absorbed by the chyle ducts, is a masterpiece of biological demonstration. Another important discovery established the saccharine function of the liver. Still more important was his demonstration of the connection between this function of the liver and the nervous system. He showed that the normal formation of sugar in the liver could be totally interrupted by severing the pneumogastric nerve in the neighbourhood of the heart, and moreover, that by a wound made on the floor of the fourth ventricle of the brain, an abnormal formation of sugar could be immediately induced—a great contribution to our knowledge of the pathology of diabetes. For these great discoveries Bernard received the physiological prizes of the French Academy in 1851 and in 1853. Later researches were on the change of temperature of the blood in its passage from one organ to another; on the absorption of oxygen by the blood, and the respective amount of it in arterial and in red and black venous blood; on the comparative properties of the opium alkaloids; on the poisonous properties of curarine; and on the sympathetic nerves in general; as well as numerous investigations on the individual processes in the act of digestion. The great experimentalist was a remarkably lucid lecturer, alike in the academic chair and on the platform, and his Leçons de Physiologie Expérimentale appliquée à la Médecine (1865) is a standard work far beyond his country. Other books are: Leçons sur les Effets des Substances Toxiques et Médicamenteuses (1857), Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865), and Leçons de Pathologie Expérimentale (1874). Many of his papers appear in the special scientific journals, and in the comptes rendus of the Académie des Sciences and the Société de Biologie, of which last he was a founder and president. See the Life by Sir Michael Foster (1899).