ABSTRACT

One hundred years ago Claude Bernard, the greatest physiologist of modern France, stepped aside from the path of scientific research to survey the principles upon which research should be conducted. His Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale was published in 1865 after he had accomplished his pioneer studies on digestion by the action of the pancreatic juice, the ‘internal secretions’—a term he invented—and the mechanisms behind the nervous control of the vascular system. All this and much more had been achieved before he was fifty. Ill-health turned him away from the laboratory to his library, where he wrote his study on the methods of experimentation, an essay regarded by many as his most noteworthy contribution to the advance of medicine.