Famous Scientist ( Claude Bernard )

-: Claude Bernard :-

Claude Bernard

Claude Bernard (12 July 1813 – 10 February 1878) was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur (now known as homeostasis, a term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon). Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science".Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations.
Bernard was born in 1813 in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche-sur-Saône. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyon, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist's shop. His leisure hours were devoted to the composition of a vaudeville comedy, and the success it achieved moved him to attempt a prose drama in five acts, Arthur de Bretagne.
At the age of twenty-one in 1834 he went to Paris, armed with this play and an introduction to Saint-Marc Girardin, but the critic dissuaded him from adopting literature as a profession, and urged him rather to take up the study of medicine. This advice Bernard followed, and in due course he became interne at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. In this way he was brought into contact with the great physiologist, François Magendie, who was physician to the hospital, and whose official 'preparateur' at the Collège de France he became in 1841.

Claude Bernard's aim, as he stated in his own words, was to establish the use of the scientific method in medicine. He dismissed many previous misconceptions, took nothing for granted, and relied on experimentation. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he insisted that all living creatures were bound by the same laws as inanimate matter.