Claude Bernard - Physiologist, Experiments, Discoveries | Britannica (2025)

Within less than a decade, from obscurity in the shadow of Magendie, he had risen to a commanding position in science. In 1854 a chair of general physiology was created for him in the Sorbonne, and he was elected to the Academy of Sciences. When Magendie died in 1855, Bernard succeeded him as full professor at the Collège de France. No laboratory had been provided for Bernard at the Sorbonne, but the French emperor Napoleon III, after an interview with him in 1864, remedied the deficiency, at the same time building a laboratory at the Museum of Natural History of the Jardin des Plantes. In 1868 Bernard left the Sorbonne to accept a newly established professorship in general physiology at this museum.

Magendie’s empirical method of conducting experiments without a guiding hypothesis was by then out of date, partly as a result of his own discoveries. Bernard’s historic role was to demonstrate the experimenter’s need for a guiding hypothesis to be either confirmed or refuted by the results.

For various reasons, a shift was occurring in Bernard’s scientific interests. The productive researcher was turning into a philosopher of science. Failing health after 1860 led him to spend more time at Saint-Julien, less time in the laboratory. Bernard suffered apparently from chronic enteritis, with symptoms affecting the pancreas and the liver. By way of compensation, the enforced leisure left him time for reflection, out of which would come his masterpiece, Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865; An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine).

This work was planned as a preface, if a very long one, to a work of greater magnitude, never completed. Bernard’s aim in the Introduction was to demonstrate that medicine, in order to progress, must be founded on experimental physiology. The other points in his argument are that (1) the physical and chemical sciences provide the foundation for physiology, although it is not reducible to them; (2) the notion of “vital force” does not explain life; (3) vivisection is indispensable for physiological research; and (4) biology depends on recognizing that the processes of life are mechanistically determined by physico-chemical forces. Still germane for modern science is his presentation of the concept of the milieu intérieur, or “internal environment,” of the body.

The book brought new honours to Bernard, notably election to the French Academy in 1868. His friends included such literary figures as Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and the Goncourts, besides such scientists as Louis Pasteur and Marcellin Berthelot.

The most renowned of the students trained by Bernard were Albert Dastre, Paul Bert, and Arsène d’Arsonval. Bert succeeded Bernard in the Sorbonne when the latter transferred to the Museum of Natural History in 1868. Bernard’s own experiments were taking new directions. The phenomena common to animals and plants formed the subject of lectures published posthumously. He also began research on fermentation. His findings were published after his death by Berthelot and, because they conflicted with Pasteur’s views, cast a cloud over the microbe hunter’s memory of his late colleague.

Bernard’s health had declined precipitously in the autumn of 1877. On New Year’s Day he caught cold, and shortly afterward inflammation of the kidneys set in. Soon he was confined to his bed. At his death Bernard was accorded a funeral arranged and financed by the government, the first ever granted to a scientist in France.