Claude Bernard and Experimental Pathology

Abstract

It is certain that Claude Bernard never referred to Comte while dealing with the problem of the relationship between the normal and the pathological, although he did solve it in an apparently similar fashion; it is equally certain that he could not ignore Comte’s opinions. We know that Claude Bernard read Comte closely, and with pen in hand, as borne out by notes dating probably from 1865–66, and published in 1938 by Jacques Chevalier [11]. For the physicians and biologists of the Second Empire, Magendie, Comte, and Claude Bernard are three gods — or three devils — of the same religion. In examining the experimental work of Bernard’s teacher, Magendie, Littré analyses those postulates which coincide with Comte’s ideas on experimentation in biology and its relation to the observation of pathological phenomena [78, 162]. E. Gley was the first to show that Claude Bernard, in his article, ‘Progrès des sciences physiologiques’ (Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 August 1865) took for his own the law of the three states, and that he had a part in publications and associations in which Charles Robin made the positivist influence felt [44, 164–170]. In 1864, together with Brown-Séquard, Robin published the Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux: reports of Bernard, Chevreul, etc. appeared in the first issues. Bernard was the second president of the Société de Biologie which Robin had founded in 1848, whose guiding principles were formulated in a lecture to the charter members:

By studying anatomy and the classification of living beings, we hope to clarify the mechanism of functions; by studying physiology, to come to know how organs can be changed and within what limits functions deviate from the normal [44, 166].