the cognitive basis of the discipline: claude bernard on physiology

The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline: Claude Bernard on PhysiologyAuthor(s): William ColemanSource: Isis, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 49-70Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/232792 .

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CRITIQUES & CONTENTIONS

The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline

Claude Bernard on Physiology

By William Coleman*

T HE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT should offer valuable insight - into the sociology of the scientific process. Science, after all, is a social

process, and the historian as well as the sociologist should have been tempted to examine with particular care those collective endeavors conducted by or manifest in what have been called scientific specialties or disciplines. Unfortunately, this promising program has suffered a grievous loss, one perhaps intrinsic to the character of the sociologist's inquiry since 1945, an era of big science and fas- cination with large-scale organization. The loss in question is, of course, the cognitive content of natural science or, better, the scientific substance of particular specialties.

This loss has not passed unperceived, and some attempts at remedial action have been made. Simply put, what is involved is the restoration or even introduction of comprehensive and exact historical research within the framework of sociology or, less formally construed, of social relations of science; the need is to see "knowledge itself as a central element in shaping the structure of disciplinary cultures and subcultures." Only thus may the divide between cognitive and social parameters of discipline formation be overcome and the amusing if unrewarding exclusivities of opposed argumentative positions reduced. I offer below a brief inquiry within this large compass, my purpose being to exhibit a concrete and perhaps exemplary instance of the necessary interaction of cognitive and social parameters in discipline formation. My orientation is consis- tently that of the intellectual historian, yet my starting point is essentially the conclusion reached by K. E. Studer and D. E. Chubin, namely, that just as war is too important to be left to generals, so is the phenomenon of the scientific discipline too significant to be left to sociologists who ignore the intellectual content of this basic operative unit in the scientific endeavor.2

* Departments of the History of Science and History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin. Mad- ison, Wisconsin 53706.

Research for this article was supported in part by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk. Hanover, and the Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung at the University of Bielefeld. I thank W. R. Albury, M. D. Grmek, F. L. Holmes, Yves Laissus, Timothy Lenoir, John Neu, Nils Roll-Hansen, and Jean Theodorides for assistance and comments.

l Charles Rosenberg, "Toward an Ecology of Knowledge: On Discipline, Context, and History," in The Organizzation of Know/ledge in Modern1 America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), p. 447.

2 K. E. Studer and D. E. Chubin, The Cancer Missioni: Social Contexts of Biomedical Research

ISIS, 1985, 76 : 49-70 49



50 WILLIAM COLEMAN

The case I shall examine, that of the physiologist Claude Bernard, discloses how a theoretical program, carefully formulated so as to correspond with the designated subject matter and methods of a science, served important apologetic purposes. The science was experimental physiology, and Bernard's purpose was to establish this science as an autonomous discipline. Autonomy may be understood to mean many things, not least among which are assurance of intellectual, institutional, and pedagogical independence. The cognitive elements of experimental physiology were to Bernard a decisive instrument in translating bold explanatory ideals and proposed methods of a science in the making into the worldly needs of laboratory space, financial support, and provision for the training of students, each a function of social organization and together consti- tuting the disciplinary domain par excellence.

From the early 1850s until his death in 1878 Bernard maintained an unrelenting campaign to win secure disciplinary standing for his science. Experimental physiology had to be invented and protected, but above all, it had to be taught, for here was the heart of Bernard's program, one tied to the importance and new meaning attached to pedagogy in an experimental laboratory setting. Bernard's campaign was a characteristic feature of his career and was not accomplished without inconsistency and self-deception. He often cited his own discoveries and procedures to illustrate or confirm the general methodological propositions he confidently put before his readers; recent scholarship has shown, however, that his early investigatory activities and later general claims do not always support one another and are sometimes contradictory.3 If concrete laboratory work and Bernard's apologia pro sua scientia thus betray discord, we need to ask why this was so. In what follows I shall develop the argument proposed by W. R. Albury, namely, that the primary focus of Bernard's later years was disciplinary justification, eventuating in a campaign that placed its greatest stress upon the distinctiveness of physiological inquiry.4 For this, a method or methods needed to be established which promised an assured approach to analysis of vital functions and at the same time reflected actual physiological practice. Bernard was deeply engaged in the politics of the scientific and medical community and elected to wage war with personal and highly intellectual weapons, deploying the claims of cognitive identity as the best means by which to define and then to seize tangible social assets.

The principal task was to separate experimental physiology from other sciences that deal with living things and to divorce it, too, from its own historical roots. This assertion of identity demanded negation as well as affirmation. In

(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), pp. 234-239. See also Everett Mendelsohn, "The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge," in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Everett Mendelsohn et al. (Dordrecht: Reidel. 1977), pp. 3-26; the essays (historically rich but usually sociologically silent) dealing with scientific disciplines in Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, ed. Loren Graham et al. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 3-117; D. 0. Edge and M. J. Mulkay, Astronomy Transfo)rned. The Emergence of Radio Astronomy in Britain1 (New York: Wiley, 1976); and D. E. Chubin, "The Conceptualization of Scientific Specialties," The Sociological Quac-rterly, 1976, 17:448- 476. For an incisive review of current problems and literature see Steven Shapin, "History of Sci- ence and its Sociological Reconstructions," Histor o(f Science, 1982, 20:157-211.

3See F. L. Holmes, Clauiide Ber-niar-d aindt Animnal Chemtistrv. The Emnergence of a Scientist (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974); and M. D. Grmek, Raisonnement expriimental et re- cherches toxicologiques chez Claude Bernlard (Geneva: Droz, 1973).

W. R. Albury, "Going Beyond the Introduction: Claude Bernard Scholarship in the 1970s" (essay review), Bulletin of the History, of Medicine, 1982, 56:275; and Holmes, Claude Bernaird and Animal Chiemistr-y, pp. 450-451.



THE COGNITIVE BASIS OF THE DISCIPLINE 51

various publications over a period of some thirty years Bernard critically examined the relation of traditional medical, that is, clinical and anatomical, investigation to physiology; the relevance of the descriptive natural sciences to physiology; and the connections between chemistry and physical science on the one hand and physiology on the other. Some of these sciences were, as physiology was intended to become, experimental laboratory sciences; others were not, and upon the meaning of this characteristic much of the argument revolved.

The scientific laboratory has, of course, ancient and varied roots. As the primary locus for both original research and the creation of new generations of skilled investigators, however, it was very much the creation of the nineteenth century. Its earliest models were probably the chemical laboratories of post- revolutionary Paris; its most influential example was surely Justus von Liebig's laboratory established at Giessen after 1824.5 It seems obvious, yet deserves emphasis, that the character of a successful scientific laboratory-its plan and facilities, the materials and methods employed therein, and the distinctive fea- tures of the conduct of an investigation-should coincide with the nature of the scientific problems to whose resolution it is dedicated. Bernard understood this point singularly well, and reasoned directly from what he held to be the fundamental phenomena of physiology, namely, the manifold activities of a living organism, to the definition of his discipline, experimental physiology. The crucial intermediary in his argument was the laboratory, for here it was that master as well as beginner in their joint effort to advance scientific understanding actually engaged vital phenomena. This engagement, and here is the critical disciplinary matter, was indispensable because it permitted the student to acquire the skills and outlook of the master. In this setting discovery and training for discovery went hand in hand, and together they formed the double product, a body of knowledge and a corps of investigators, the cognitive structure and the social unit, that constituted the discipline. Such at least was Bernard's conviction and fundamental purpose.

This was a common purpose, one widely shared throughout the natural sciences. It acquired added force in Bernard's hands because the secrets of life seemed to demand this approach and no other. From a conception of life, Ber- nard moved directly to a conception of the science of life. This permitted him a first definition of experimental physiology. The object of physiological inquiry was not, he announced, the nature of life, but instead the experimental "determination" of vital phenomena. Such phenomena were numerous and confusing; they were also notoriously mobile and complex. Nonetheless, the physiologist, like any other scientist, needed to assume the regularity of the laws of nature as a condition for scientific discourse. He also assumed that in matters physiological one could repeat one's experimental operations and confidently expect that a given phenomenon would return.

At the core of the argument was the following proposition: "In any science, the conditions [under which a phenomenon appears] are all that we can know. . . . It is illusory to think that we can seize the essence of any phenomenon whatsoever. . . . Determinism [is] a necessary principle in physiology, and determinism makes known the conditions under which phenomena are revealed

I See Maurice Crosland, Gay-Lussac: Scientist and Bouirgeois (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 248-253; Peter Borscheid, Naturwvissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden (1848- 1914) (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976), pp. 33-50; and J. B. Morrell, "The Chemist Breeders: the Re- search Schools of Liebig and Thomas Thompson," Ambix. 1972. 19:1-46.



52 WILLIAM COLEMAN

to us, [the situation in which they are] suppressed, produced or modified."6 Im- manuel Kant and others had already expressed the general tenor of this argument. Kant had hoped for a mechanistic but not reductionist biology, and on this point the positivistic tradition of which Bernard was a foremost exemplar tended to agree. The crucial matter was to accept the purposiveness of life as a principle of analysis, but also to insist upon the legitimacy and necessity of approaching the living organism in a deterministic manner. If we assume, as these critical teleologists assumed, that the organism is an integrated set of diverse organs acting in a harmonious way, then our problem becomes one of how can we gain access to the complex whole.7 We have posited that the actual operations of life, which are wholly distinct from the unknowable essence of life, proceed mechanistically. It follows that if we learn to recognize and control the physiochemical conditions of a vital action, we shall at the same time learn something of greatest importance regarding that action. We shall have dominated a phenomenon of life. From such knowledge flows the capacity to call forth again this and other vital phenomena and to establish the relations between thein, the latter being the supreme aim of physiology.

Just here is the crucial connection between Bernard's emphasis upon the centrality of a conception of life and the relation of that conception to a science of life and the disciplinary demands of that science. Experimental physiology pro- ceeds mechanistically. It respects the singularity of life, yet renders life a matter open to rigorous scientific scrutiny. The disciplinary autonomy of experimental physiology was, in Bernard's view, to be established by two arguments. It required, first of all, an acceptance of the conjunction noted above, namely, that between his conception of life and the need for a deterministic science together with its supporting operational structure. It also followed necessarily from the process of definition by limitation. Bernard took great care to show how other scientific disciplines were incapable of providing an exact analysis of vital phenomena. None could seize and dominate the all-important "conditions" by which the global phenomenon called life is determined and whose apprehension was precisely the task of physiology.8 This argument ruled out other contenders for hegemony over the study of life, a role henceforth reserved for experimental physiology.

Since the function of experimental physiology was to provide a new basis for medicine, one might suppose that the traditional centers of medical inquiry, the hospital ward and the dissection room, would also serve for physiological in-

6 Claude Bernard, 'Les definitions de la vie," La rev ue scientifique de la France et de lIetranger, 1877, 2nd ser., 7:515.

7 On the Kantian tradition of critical teleology see Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Te- leology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982); and esp. Nils Roll-Hansen, 'Critical Teleology: Immanuel Kant and Claude Bernard on the Limitations of Experimental Physiology," Journal of thle History of Biology, 1976, 9:59-91.

8 To Bernard it was "an experimental axiom that in living bodies as well as in inorganic bodies the necessary conditions of every phenomenon are absolutely determined. That is to say . . . that when once the conditions of a phenomenon are known and fulfilled, the phenomenon must always and necessarily be reproduced at the will of the experimenter. Negation of this proposition would be nothing less than the negation of science itself." Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Medicine, trans. H. C. Greene (New York: Dover, 1957), pp. 67-68; Grmek, Raisonnemnent experimental, pp. 25-51; and Bernard Halpern, "Concepts philosophiques de Claude Bernard d'apres l'Introduction a l't1ide de la Medecine experitnentale,- Revue d'histoire des sciences et des techniques, 1966, 19:97-114.




vestigation. They did not do so, however, for the physician who used them was a passive observer of vital processes. Bernard agreed that observation provided the essential basepoint for all science; after all, it was just here that contact was made with empirical fact. Nevertheless, the clinician merely received what he saw, felt, tasted, smelled, or heard. He might even use instruments to sharpen his observations; by 1860 clinical thermometry, the opthalmoscope, and the mi- croscope had been widely accepted and were contributing to greater diagnostic precision. Only then, if at all, did the clinician attempt to create a more general or more definite portrait of the situation that had presented itself.9

But diagnosis, the culmination of observational medicine, could be pursued with great skill and effect and still not give medicine what in Bernard's view it most needed, namely, new and efficacious means for treating disease.'0 The physician for the most part still acted blindly or followed traditional therapeutic practices. He conducted few inquiries into the effects and even fewer into the causes of the effects of his remedies. At best, the physician's observations in the hospital might provide interesting problems for independent experimental investigation in pathology or physiology; at worst, burdened by uncontrolled impressions, the physician sank in a sea of directionless empiricism.

When a patient had advanced to the post-mortem room, a common enough occurrence, the scientific situation only worsened. The clinician had at least observed the living body; the pathological anatomist saw only the inertness of death. Both clinician and pathologist perceived clearly that conditions of disease exist or had existed, yet before their experienced eyes "the physiological mech- anisms and the general disorders which result from these [conditions] pass unob- served. " 11

This constituted a frontal attack on the greatest glory of contemporary French and much European medicine, the combination of pathological anatomy and exacting clinical description that had laid the foundations for a revolution in diag- nostics.12 To be sure, neither the clinician nor the pathologist was to be driven

9 Bernard, LecJons de pathologie experimenttale (1871), in Morceaux choisis, ed. Jean Rostand (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p. 181. Bernard's expression experimental medicine was polemical. The Introduction and the Principes de la inedecine experimentale (the manuscript of which was finally published in 1947) did not simply constitute Bernard's reflections on his science but were clearly addressed to the prevailing and well-voiced view that medicine is not and cannot be experimental. In these works Bernard had a prominent rival view of medicine in mind. See, above all, Armand Trousseau, "Introduction de l'auteur," Cliniquie inudicale de l'HOtel-Dieu de Par-is, 2 vols. (Ist ed., 1861-1862; Geneva: Alliance culturelle du livre, 1963). Vol. 1, pp. 39-77; and Trousseau, Confr- ences sur l'empirisme faites d la facuiltc5 de medecine de Pairis le 18 et 25 ,nai (Paris: Adrien Delahaye. 1862). Trousseau demanded that the physician most needs to know the course of a disease; Bernard insisted that he begin to seek its cause. See Raoul Kourilsky, "La medecine clinique vue par Claude Bernard," in Philosophie et inethodologie scientifique de Claide Bernaird, ed. Etienne Wolff et al. (Paris: Masson, 1967), pp. 65-83.

0 See Julius Petersen, Hauptoinotente in der geschichtlichen Entiw,ickliung dei medicinischen Tlzer- apie (Copenhagen: H0st, 1877), pp. 213-342. Bernard's generation by no means resolved the clinician-scientist rivalry; see G. L. Geison, "Divided We Stand: Physiologists and Clinicians in the American Context," in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Mecl- icine, ed. M. J. Vogel and C. E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 67- 90; R. C. Maulitz, "'Physician versus Bacteriologist': The Ideology of Science in Clinical Medi- cine," ibid., pp. 91-107.

Bernard, Lec,ons de pathologie experimentale, in Morceaux choisis, p. 180. 2 See E. H. Ackerknecht, Medicine (it tile Pairis Hospital, 1794-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Univ. Press, 1967); and Johanna Bleker, Die naturihistoriscihe Schile: Eim Beitrag czur Geschichte der klinischen Medizin in Deutschlaind (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1981).



54 WILLIAM COLEMAN

from the medical scene; Bernard was guilty of no such absurdity. He insisted, however, on the very serious limitations of their inquiry. The clinician and the pathological anatomist were inactive, they merely observed. They neither con- trolled nor sought to control the phenomena they so patiently examined. In effect, they faced the vital phenomenon without arms, and this meant that determination of the conditions governing the appearance of a vital phenomenon and establishing its relations to other phenomena was impossible. This in turn meant that truly scientific knowledge was impossible and that the clinician and the pathologist were peripheral to what medicine most needed, that is, an understanding of normal and abnormal vital processes, which alone could provide a basis for seeking the means for counteracting disease. Theirs was a fruitless empiricism.

In effect, medicine was merely a contemplative science, content with observation and shy of intervention. In this respect it shared Bernard's scorn for botany, zoology, and other descriptive sciences. "All natural sciences are observational sciences," he declared.

They contemplate nature and can at most predict an event. All the experimental sciences [in contrast] are explanatory sciences which advance beyond the observational sciences, the latter serving as their foundation. The experimental sciences in the end become the active sciences, that is, these sciences dominate nature. This fundamental distinction derives from the very definition of observation and experimentation. The observer accepts phenomena just as nature sets them before him; the experimenter makes them appear under conditions of which he is the master.13

This celebrated claim, however it was received by physicians, provoked much anguish among biologists. They saw their science relegated to the past and themselves portrayed as mere classifiers and describers. The observational sciences, embracing clinical investigation, pathological anatomy, zoology, and botany, were rendered impotent by the passivity of their methodology, and methodology to an activist such as Bernard was the crucial disciplinary criterion.

He had also to consider another and more formidable rival. Chemistry was a relatively advanced experimental science whose methods and conclusions were obviously pertinent to the study of life. Bernard's own researches on digestion, glycogenesis, and the action of toxic substances required considerable chemical skill and understanding, to which his able collaborators contributed much. Chemical techniques and concepts he judged to be indispensable aids to the physiologist. Chemistry alone, however, must not presume to answer physiological questions. Under the stimulus of Liebig, the analysis of organic substances had advanced rapidly, and there began after 1860 the great movement toward the creation of synthetic organic chemistry.14 It was easy to believe, and some who called themselves physiological chemists did believe, that perfection of the arts of organic analysis and then of synthesis held an essential key to understanding vital processes.

Bernard's particular targets were Jean-Baptiste Dumas's physiological dualism (plants and animals exhibit distinct physiologies) and Liebig's notion that one

3 Bernard, De la phvsiologie generale (Paris: Hachette, 1872; rpt. 1965), pp. 186-187. 14 The condition of physiological chemistry and particularly its central problem at mid-century,

digestion, is portrayed by Holmes, Clalude Bernard and An-imal Chemistry, passim.




could discover the character of the chemical transformations occurring within the living organism by measuring the chemical input and output of the body. Liebig appeared to be doing physiology on the cheap, that is, deducing the course of vital events without access to the physiological conditions that gov- erned intermediary transformations. This approach was false, Bernard held, because seriously incomplete. It exaggerated the role of chemical analysis at the expense of physiological reality. The chemist possessed numerous and exact facts, but they were isolated facts, isolated because separated from the concrete, intimate detail of bodily structure and action. "One must never forget," Bernard observed, ". . . that in the science of life brute facts never constitute proofs." In order to grasp the meaning of such facts, in this case chemical facts, further knowledge is required: "to judge a question of vital action, one must be a physiologist.""5 Chemical elements were, it seemed, everywhere the same and so were the laws of chemical combination. But chemical combination depends on many conditions, and, in physiology, not least among those conditions were bodily structure and action. The chemist contentedly overlooked this fact.

This argument translates directly into disciplinary justification. The phenomena of life can be approached only by comprehending and then controlling all the conditions under which a particular event, including a chemical event, occurs. In matters physiological, the necessary framework within which control must occur is the living body. The chemist failed as physiologist because he failed to take into account the structural and functional singularities that an organism presents to the observer. With regard to chemistry, therefore, the task of the physiologist was to make use of that science in any manner possible, recognizing of course that this was likely to be a very difficult task, and always to situate a chemical event of interest within a definite corporeal frame. The task of the chemist was to explore the nature of chemical change, and to forget his pretentions regarding physiology.'6

Bernard's unswerving dedication to disciplinary limitation by definition was aimed above all at the deeply entrenched values and practices of Parisian academic physicians and at the ambitions of the expansive chemical community led by French and, increasingly, German investigators. He did not reject the wares offered by these trades. Instead, he appropriated them as needed, added others, and thus circumscribed his new science, experimental physiology. His trinity of methodological procedure embraced vivisection, in which anatomy and surgery joined to provide direct access to vital activities; c hemistry, now fruitfully working in close conjunction with analysis of the inner structure and function of the living body; and histology, which promised to move physiological insight beyond the body parts themselves, liver, kidney, or lung, to their presumed

15 Bernard, Lecons de physiologie experimentale appliquee d la nzedecine (1855-1856), in Mor- ceaux choisis, p. 31. Liebig's analytic procedures and program are described by F. L. Holmes, "Elementary Analysis and the Origins of Physiological Chemistry," Isis, 1963, 54:50-81. Holmes also explores the German chemist's physiological reasoning in the Introduction to [Justus von Liebig], Animal Chemistry (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1964). On Bernard versus Dumas and Liebig, see Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry, pp. 445-455 and passim.

16 Bernard also rejected the claims of physics upon the rights of physiology; see De la physiologie generale, p. 330. In truth, few rival views were welcome: "There are physiologists who are too much the physicist (Dubois-Reymond), the chemist (Dumas, Liebig), [or] the anatomist ([Henri- Milne] Edwards)"; Claude Bernard, Notes pour le rapport sur les progres de la physiologie, ed. M. D. Grmek (Paris: Collge de France, 1979). Grmek emphasizes the centrality of these distinctions in Bernard's own demand for a truly "physiological physiology" (ibid., p. 17).



56 WILLIAM COLEMAN

irreducible living elements, the cells."7 In all such studies, observation and description were merely a prelude to directed intervention. The latter alone, called, loosely speaking, experimentation, led to the desired goal, an understanding of vital processes. To Bernard knowledge became scientific only insofar as an investigator dominated every parameter that accompanied the appearance of a given phenomenon. "The goal I have set for myself in all of my physiological studies," he wrote in mid-career, is "to act upon the vital phenomena using stimuli of every kind. . . One must never lose sight of the goal of physiology and experimental medicine, [namely, we want] to conquer fixing natuire, act upon v,ital phenomena and regutlate and modiify them."'8

Bernard was calling for an exhaustive scientific engagement of life. His program stood upon clearly identified intellectual foundations, namely, a conception of life that steadfastly refused to state a definition of life and which necessitated a pragmatic criterion of knowledge: we know with assurance only that which we have experientially engaged and experimentally mastered (the dual meaning of experience is encountered throughout Bernard's methodological reflections). Here, then, was the proper province of the physiologist. He was not to be found in the hospital or in the morgue; upon living men one cannot experiment and in the cadaver there is no life. The physiologist's world, unlike that of the physician, was to be circumscribed by the laboratory. The matter is well summarized by Bernard's own words: "I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation that a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek ex- planations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis. "9

Pointedly, Bernard compared the organism to a workshop.20 Even when the many tools within the shop are at rest one recognizes that these are complex objects and that each surely possesses a distinct function. But superficial observation cannot teach us what this function is. We learn to understand such functions only when the workshop is active. It is no different when we attempt to enter that other workshop, the living body. We must seize its parts and their functions while they work. We do so and can do so only by participating in those actions. Our participation cannot be abrupt or seriously disruptive; our skill is measured by our capacity to enter the organism, holding all processes constant save the one or few whose particular character we wish to explore. Because access to the living workshop-organism is so difficult, we must create another workshop that is specially devoted to the task.

Bernard's own experience in workshop-laboratories had been varied and often unsatisfactory.21 Upon completion of his medical internship (1842) he served for two years as pre'parateur for Franqois Magendie's course in physiology at the

17 Bernard, "Histoire de l'experimentation physiologique-l'art d'experimenter sur les etres vi- vants," Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l'etrcanger, 1868-1869, 6:197.

8 Bernard, Principes de mneecine experinzentale, ed. Leon Delhoume (Paris: Presses universi- taires de France. 1947), p. 285.

'9 Bernard, Introduction, p. 146. 20 Bernard. Lecons de physiologie experiinentale appliqule d la tnmdecine, in Morceaux choisis,

pp. 40-41. 21 Bernard's professional positions are recorded by J. M. D. and E. H. Olmsted, Claude Bernard

and the Experimental Method in Medicine (New York: Collier Books, 1961), passirn. See also M. D. Grmek, "Claude Bernard." in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 14 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1970-1980), Vol. II, pp. 24-34.




College de France. Like his master, he had the use of the inadequate laboratory provided by that institution. Between 1844 and 1847 he held no official position and had to work either at home or in the private laboratories of friends. He was appointed suppleant to Magendie in May 1847 and could again use the laboratory at the College. But these facilities were small, animal quarters were insufficient, and research funds almost nonexistent. Only in 1852 did Bernard himself begin to receive a small payment for his services, and only toward the end of his most creative period in active experimental work, in 1854, did he receive the chair of general physiology at the Faculty of Science in Paris. This position, however, provided minimal facilities and these only for lecture demonstrations; there was no laboratory for research or teaching purposes. Bernard's personal researches there were carried out in a narrow, damp chamber beneath a staircase. Finally, in 1855, he succeeded Magendie in the chair of medicine at the College de France, where laboratory conditions had not improved. This sorry and often dramatized story allows little wonder that Bernard and other physiologists re- peatedly insisted that France provided poorly for her original minds or that, in Bernard's case, relentless disciplinary demands were reinforced by a sense of personal deprivation.22

The subject matter of physiology virtually required the creation of laboratories, and Bernard's personal experience lent a conspicuous passion to the demand for these facilities. That an experimental science requires a laboratory seems a truism. But Bernard faced colleagues in Paris who refused to recognize that medicine either was or might become an experimental science or that there were important lessons to be learned from experimental physiology (see above, note 9). This conviction, of course, reduced the laboratory ideal to a mockery. The situation appeared very different elsewhere, above all, across the Rhine. Bernard the discipline builder joined with many other voices in the 1860s and 1870s to announce to a stunned French audience the extraordinary scientific advances made in recent years by German investigators and to indicate, too, that these advances had been greatly encouraged by public recognition and gen- erous support of the institutions of science and medicine. Here was a further argument to be bent to the needs of rigorous scientific development and its ac- companying disciplinary justification.

By the 1860s the German research university and especially its associated system of scientific and humanistic institutes had reached early maturity. In the biomedical domain specialization advanced rapidly, and with the creation of new chairs came the construction of new or the expansion of old laboratories. Surely the most celebrated physiological laboratory in Germany was that directed by Carl Ludwig. Ludwig's splendid new quarters in Leipzig, opened in 1869, became an international sensation and were quickly turned to political use in Britain and the United States as well as in France.23

22 The general complaint was sharply stated by Louis Pasteur, "Le budget de science," Rev. cours sci. France l'&tranger, 1868, 5:137-139. See also Ashley Miles, "Reports by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard on the Organization of Scientific Teaching and Research," Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1982, 37: 101-1 18.

23 See Heinz Schroer, Carl Ludwvig: Begriinder der inessenden Pl2ysiologie (Stuttgart: Wissen- schaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1967). The new, scientifically oriented institutes were by no means always welcomed by academic medicine or the practitioner; see the brief remarks in Paul Diepgen, Geschichte der Medizin: Die historische Entvvicklitng der Heilkunde lund des irztlichen Lebens, 3 vols. in 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1949-1955), Vol. 11, Pt. 1, pp. 204-216; Vol. II, Pt. 2, pp. 281-284.



58 WILLIAM COLEMAN

Bernard in the same year described the Leipzig institute in approving detail, calling it a "truly model physiological institute" and letting no one mistake its significance regarding the autonomy of physiology. He admired the institute's spacious quarters for research animals and the variety, quality, and abundance of equipment that was provided. He frankly envied the ample budget, the institute's general and specialized laboratory rooms, and especially Ludwig's large corps of assistants and collaborating investigators. In this building, Bernard observed, we meet all the conditions "necessary for the progress of physiology. Here physiology stands emancipated in every respect. From an intellectual point of view, physiology has made clear its special position, one independent of that of the other sciences . . .; from a material point of view, it has gained its own home and won the means necessary for its inquiries."24

The German physiological institute in the third quarter of the nineteenth century combined diverse functions. As part of the medical faculty, it provided basic instruction for the medical student."5 This instruction included lectures that were usually illustrated with elaborate experimental demonstrations. The institute also allowed the student with special initiative to undertake elementary researches of his own. In addition the institute received advanced students, graduates, and visitors who were often already active scientists, and it provided a setting in which all could work together under the general supervision of the institute's director and his professional staff. Supported by knowledgeable technical assistants and provided with plentiful modern scientific equipment and the necessary animal material, the physiological institute was designed to further instruction and research simultaneously. By no means were all German physiological institutes so large, diverse, or well-endowed as that of Ludwig at Leipzig or the new facilities built for Du Bois-Reymond in Berlin (1877), and certainly not all lived up to the high expectations of their creators. Many did, however, and, most importantly, they were supported in their work by similar institutes dedicated to closely related subjects (anatomy, pathology, physiological chemistry, pharmacology) and other sciences (chemistry, physics). These several institutes constituted a remarkably effective training ground for specialists, experimental physiologists among others, and they and the universities and hospitals to which they were attached also assured, especially in the expansive phase of their development (which continued into the 1880s), a reasonable prospect for the employment and professional advancement of their graduates and associates.

Curiously, Bernard did not present university or other authorities with a de- tailed shopping list of the facilities, staff, and equipment needed to outfit an up- to-date physiological laboratory, and his financial demands, although large, were

24 Bernard, "Histoire de l'exp6rimentation physiologique." pp. 196-197. 25 For the scattered and uneven literature on this topic see Hans-Heinz Eulner, Die Entvwicklung

der medicinischen Spezialfacher an den UniversiWiten des deutschen Sprachgebietes (Stuttgart: Enke, 1970); see also Theodor Billroth, The Medical Sciences in the German Universities: A Study in the Historn of Civ,ilization, trans. anon. (New York: Macmillan, 1924). For comprehensive and appreciative but not uncritical French views of these institutions, see Sigismond Jaccoud, De lor- ganisation des FacuWltes de me,decine en Allemlagne: Rapport presente ai S. Exc. le ministre de l'in- striction publique, le 6 octobre 1863 (Paris: Delahaye, 1864); and Adolphe Wurtz, Les haiutes Otudes pratiquies daans les uniiversits allemandes (Paris: Imprimerie imperiale, 1870). Both reports were prepared at the request of the minister, Victor Duruy, and both quickly became important elements in the propaganda campaign aimed at gaining comparable facilities for France; see George Pouchet,

L'enseignement superieur des sciences en Allemagne," Reiviue des deiux mondes, 1869, 83:430-449; and Fernand Papillon, "Les laboratoires en France et a 1'tranger," ibid., 1871, 94:594-609.



THE COGNI1T IVE BASIS OF THE DISCIPLINE 59

quite unspecific.26 In his own original researches he had relied upon simple chemical tests, surgical virtuosity, ingenuity in experinmental design, and the vol- untary assistance of a small group of associates. Despite these apparent limitations it would be difficult to indicate an investigation that he failed to begin or complete because of a shortage of means. Nonetheless, at neither the Faculty of Science nor the College de France had suitable space or adequate equipment and materials been available for conducting physiological research which could, at one and the same time, generate a set of inquiries into the unknown and constitute a basis for training others who might elect to follow the same pursuit. Bernard's research exhibits many marks of the loner, but he was acutely aware of the social dimension involved in training others for such a career. The tragedy was that there seemed to be no such thing in France as a career in experimental physiology that was open to anyone other than the solitary and very bold ad- venturer. Bernard's campaign to create a discipline of experimental physiology was directed to this problem, and it was precisely here that the German example seemed to exhibit its overwhelming advantage.

The physiological laboratory for Bernard thus served a dual function, and its pedagogical role was if anything of greater disciplinary importance than its part in the process of scientific discovery. But first one must have a laboratory in which to work, and this Bernard received only at the close of his career. By an exchange of chairs and the redesignation of that at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle as the Chair of General Physiology, Bernard acquired in December 1868 a new laboratory, one of the first in the wave of such creations that finally reached France in the 1870s and especially the 1880s.27 It was Pasteur who had suggested this arrangement, and the exchange was also part of a conjunction of purposes that brought Bernard and the reform-minded minister of public instruction, Victor Duruy, into close collaboration, united with others in an effort to marshal the intellectual forces and exhibit the recent progress of the sciences and arts in France.

Bernard's laboratory was, however, a very modest installation, especially when compared with physiological institutions in Germany (see Fig. 1). More- over, because of the profound disruption caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, it supported little activity before 1873. Unlike other

26 Bernard's personal financial situation was quite adequate, but funds for research were another matter entirely. To a request for an endowment of 400,000 francs for his new laboratory, the Em- peror replied that "physiology costs as much as artillery," of which he had great need but made poor use; he provided no funds (Olmsted and Olmsted, Claude Bernard, p. 170). The sum considered appropriate for the laboratory was 40,000 francs; see Victor Duruy, Notes et souvenirs (1811-1894), 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1901), Vol. 11, pp. 313-314. Funds for operational expenses continued to be very small, standing at some 700-1000 francs (greater sums were spent purchasing individual specimens for the anatomical collections); see Proces-verbaux des professeurs du Museum, Bib- liotheque du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, for the later 1860s and early 1870s.

27 Olmsted and Olmsted, Claude Bernard, p. 154. Bernard's appointment at the Museum coincided with a brief period of general interest in experimental biology at that institution; see Camille Lim- oges, "Development of the Museum," in Organization of Science and Technology in France, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (London/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press: Paris: Maison des Sci- ences de l'Homme, 1980), pp. 211-240. On the improvement in career expectations after 1850 see Victor Karady, "Educational Qualifications and University Careers in Science in Nineteenth-Cen- tury France," ibid., pp. 95-124, esp. Table 1, p. 100. On efforts to reform the French science faculties see George Weisz, "Le corps professionel de l'enseignement superieur et l'ideologie de la reforme universitaire en France, 1860-1885," Retue fran,caise de sociologie, 1977, 18:201-232; and Terry Shinn, "The French Science Faculty System, 1808-1914: Institutional Change and Research Potential in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1979, 10:271-332.



60 WILLIAM COLEMAN

.... ~~~~* .. .....

1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 "In L

Figure 1. The laboratory of comparative physiology, which became the laboratory of general physiology in 1868, at the Museum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle. This small building served a succession of five professors for a period of over seventy years. In 1917 the activities of the chair were transferred to laboratories originally built for work in comparative pathology and this structure, still standing, became a serW~ce building for the Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes. (Photo courtesy of the archives of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle.)

professors, Bernard took no part in the administrative or other affairs of the Museum, save for delivering the remarkable course of lectures that eventuated in the Legons sur les phe'nome'nes communs aux plantes et animaux. When finally his laboratory did begin to function, it was largely under the supervision of a new protfg6, Ars'ene d'Arsonval.

Bernard enthusiastically supported d'Arsonval's research, which introduced electrophysiological methods into France. But this kind of work, which was familiar coin in Germany, had not been part of his original plan for the laboratory. That plan followed exactly the purpose and methods that he long had held to define the scope of physiology. What was especially needed, he declared, was ample space both for research and for the training of a new generation of physiologists. Bernard's goal being always to further work of medical relevance, numerous and often quite large animals were required. An investigator at the Mu- seum could care for and work with such animals and thus carry out researches in experimental pathology and physiology that it had been simply impossible to conduct at either the Sorbonne or the Coll'ege de France. This was research based upon vivisection, the cornerstone of Bernardian method.

The Museum possessed a long, if now inactive, tradition in applied chemistry. The aged Michel-Eug'ene Chevreul, who had been at the Museum since 1830, encouraged Bernard's successful efforts to include in the new laboratory pro-




visions for chemical analysis and other measures designed to further the application of chemical knowledge and techniques to physiological understanding. Bernard failed, however, to win support for installing the third leg of his methodological tripod, histology, at the Museum. But he was soon able to complete his plan by bringing Louis-Antoine Ranvier to the Collge de France, where the latter became his assistant and tended to the affairs of microscopical anatomy.

A part of the new Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Bernard's laboratory at the Museum had no parallel at the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Med- icine still remained proudly free of experimental physiology.28 Only the Ecole Normale Superieure under the far-seeing guidance of Pasteur had begun to create a program for training research scientists and attempting to assure them meaningful employment.29 Although men of strikingly different personality and scientific formation, Bernard and Pasteur shared a common ambition. France, they held, like other nations must find a way to cultivate its native scientific genius, for which the starting point must necessarily be education broadly construed.

These events at the Museum meant much more than an opportunity to exploit more fully and efficaciously research methods that were already familiar. They meant, as Bernard happily if prematurely insisted, that "we shall now have in France laboratories in which young physiologists can be trained in large num- bers, in imitation of what is occurring in Germany and elsewhere." These laboratories-an expectant plural was offered-constituted an "'essential condition" for the progress of the experimental sciences, for it is not by "course work that one creates savants." Quite the contrary, the true savant emerges only from the laboratory and this because only there does "he engage himself with the phenomena themselves."30 An organization, that is, a coordinated institutional framework with material resources, guided by a clear conception of the character and goal of scientific physiology, was, Bernard believed, what France "absolutely lacked." Because of this deficiency, France also lacked able young physiologists.

Bernard's demands constitute an important element in a major effort beginning in the 1860s to revivify French science and medicine. The earlier organization and practice of scientific and medical instruction in France obviously had not encouraged original research on the part of the professoriate, and it had definitely discouraged the development of research interests and skills among po- tentially interested students. The widespread emphasis upon didactic lecturing and eloquent displays before a popular audience assured that a university lec- turer focused more upon pleasing his auditors than upon exploring in depth the substance of his science.31 The staff of the science faculties devoted much of

28 On the varying condition of natural science at the Faculty of Medicine, always a matter of paramount concern to Bernard, see George Weisz, "Reform and Conflict in French Medical Edu- cation, 1870-1914," in Organilzation of Science and Technology in France, ed. Fox and Weisz, pp. 81-94; this essay provides the basic framework for my own discussion.

29 See Craig Zwerling, "The Emergence of the Ecole Normale Superieure as a Centre of Scientific Education in the Nineteenth Century," in Organizlation of Science and Technology in France, ed. Fox and Weisz, pp. 31-60.

30 Bernard, "La Medecine d'observation et la medecine experimentale." Rev. cours sci. France l'etranger, 1868-1869, 6:103.

31 For the following discussion, see Robert Fox, "Scientific Enterprise and the Patronage of Re- search in France, 1800-1870," Minerva, 1973, 11:442-473 and the works of Weisz, Shinn, Limoges, and Zwerling cited above (nn. 27-29).



62 WILLIAM COLEMAN

its time to advising secondary school teachers and examining the graduates of these schools. These were important pedagogical functions, but they stood well removed from the ideal of independent research by professor or student. In medicine as in science, the route to an academic career was not prepared by original work but by demonstration of those abilities held to be essential for the public role of the professor, namely, a capacitfy to speak strikingly and thoroughly upon a set subject. The examination for the notorious agreggation assured that filling one's memory and developing rhetorical flourish dominated university studies. The medical student would in addition have to exhibit clinical skill, above all in diagnosis. He could develop this skill only by continued attendance and observation in the hospital wards; it was not to be won in the laboratory, even if the latter had been available.

The Second Empire at first ventured few changes in this unhappy situation. The faculties were subjected to close ideological surveillance, and the integration of secondary and university instruction remained unchallenged, much to the det- riment of the latter. The government feared novelty not only for political reasons but because academic innovations usually meant new and perhaps considerable public expenditure. Change began only in the 1860s. It was stimulated by the interest of Duruy within the administration and by the agitation of the numerous French scientists, humanists, and occasional physicians who either had had direct experience of German seminars and laboratories or who understood the intellectual as well as economic and political implications of these institutions. New chairs in the sciences were created in provincial universities, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes came into being in Paris (1868), and budgets were increased slightly. Bernard's welcome prospect of developing a major research and training laboratory at the Museum was part of this movement.

The Third Republic, eager to find friends among a new and secularly oriented intelligentsia, transcended these modest innovations and transformed the face of French science and medicine.32 Additional professorships were created and scholarships established. The faculties became considerably more independent, and their intimate connection with secondary instruction was severed. Local control and financial contributions by industry were encouraged. The government finally accepted research as a primary function of the university, a step long resisted on general grounds and one which, being too obviously modeled on the practice of the recent enemy, many found a painful if necessary innovation. Scientific creativity became a primary criterion for advancement within the academy, and graded new positions below the professoriate were provided as a further stimulus.

No less important, laboratory construction and other improvements in physical facilities became a major preoccupation at the Museum and in the science and medical faculties. Efforts were also made to provide the medical faculties with a full-time clinical staff, one that might be more inclined to engage in research and to encourage students to do the same. Funds were granted, too, to recruit the support staff necessary for medical research.33

The French university system benefited enormously from these changes, and perhaps the greatest beneficiaries were those, whether humanists or scientists,

32 See esp. Shinn, "The French Faculty System," pp. 302-315. 33 Weisz, "Reform and Conflict in French Medical Education," pp. 69-78, 84-93.




who were devoted to the research ideal. But if the reforms were enduring in an organizational sense, their progress in tangible terms was to slow dramatically by the later 1880s. Old problems returned, including that of finding ways to assure the development and sustain the activity of young medical and scientific investigators. Battered by serious budgetary constraints, aging equipment, and a deteriorating student-faculty ratio, routine instruction recaptured lost ground, and the defenders of the old order, a numerous group that by no means had been eliminated by the reforms, continued to provide a dismal example, in the eyes of critics, for the aspiring student.34

Bernard did not live to see this retrogression. His advocacy of physiology as a discipline had begun in relatively bleak times and reached a crescendo during those years, roughly 1865 to 1878, in which the goal of reform was defined and a commitment made to restore French medicine and science to a prominent Eu- ropean position. His goal, of course, was precisely that of others involved in reform. France must create a realistic career prospect for the able student, and she must begin by identifying, training, and encouraging that student. This could be accomplished only by assuring the student the means for sustained personal involvement in the doing of science. The laboratory was thus the central institution for the development of both science and scientists. It was also, as has been described above, the physical manifestation of the investigatory methods demanded by the cognitive content of Bernard's programmatic endeavor.

The laboratory reflected, too, the new expectations and basic changes then moving throughout the educational system in France and elsewhere. As Bernard had noted, the great advantage of the scientific laboratory was the opportunity it provided students and investigators at any level to engage naturai phenomena directly. The form of that engagement was established by the experimental means employed, and its purpose was to gain secure scientific knowledge by dominating the totality of the vital conditions that exercised an influence upon a given physiological event or process. The certainty of this knowledge (Bernard favored such an expression) was thus assured by the rigor of the operations themselves.35 Once again we meet the physiologist's pragmatic criterion of scientific truth. To Bernard action was not simply the business of restless and cu- rious investigators, it was a crucial element in the constitution of science. Verbal dispute and rhetorical flourish, the inveterate vices of the medical profession, resolved nothing; experience did, for it provided the facts upon which alone reason could usefully operate. "The aim of judgment," he observed, "is action; one must act in order to speak [meaningfully] and decisions should rest upon experiential facts and not on reason alone."36

The heart of the laboratory ideal is incorporated in this claim. Bernard, like his own master, Magendie, and even more like the early leaders of experimental physiology in Germany, held to a "hands on" view of scientific advance. The laboratory provided the most suitable setting for immediate contact with natural phenomena, and, viewed from the other direction, those phenomena, together

34 Ibid. 3' This claim provided the basis for Bernard's rejection of a promising new mode of reasoning,

namely, statistics. See William Coleman, "Neither Empiricism nor Probability: the Experimental Approach," in Probability Since 1800: Interdisciplinarv Stuidies of Scientific De,elopment (Wissen- schaftsforschung, 25), ed. Michael Heidelberger et al. (Bielefeld: B. Kleine, 1983), pp. 275-286.

36 Bernard, Notes, p. 52, n. 6.



64 WILLIAM COLEMAN

with the laboratory that was designed to seize their singularities, displayed the distinctive character of the new physiology. Together, unique phenomena and tailored investigatory methods announced and confirmed physiology's disciplinary autonomy. But in the background of these developments there stood the connection between experimental science and crucially important reforms in the aims and methods of pedagogy, thus relating the science to larger social and national goals.

Bernard himself did not ponder the direction that primary and secondary education should take, but did insist on the crucial distinctness of higher education.37 Those, however, with whom he worked towards university and medical reform-above all, his constant supporter, Duruy, from whom he expected to obtain the administrative and financial means by which to bring the laboratory to physiology-had the former question very much in mind. Well before the 1860s French primary and secondary schooling had begun to move away from rote learning in an effort to involve the child in its own education and to prepare him or her for the new economic life envisaged for France.38 While traditional humanistic values still prevailed for children of the notables, other schools ventured to offer reading more for instruction than edification and moved to pho- netic instruction in language, thus definitely shifting to the use of the vernacular. They furthermore transformed writing from ornamental script to more easily ex- ecuted utilitarian forms, insisted on adoption of the metric system and aban- donment of local measures, and made room for new and seemingly practical subjects.

Moreover, the creation of cours specialux or ecoles speciales, attached to secondary instruction and designed to put practical subjects insistently before the student, had begun in the 1820s. These schools were the particular enthusiasm of Duruy, who emphasized the "special" pedagogical purpose behind them. They were the predecessors of the modern school, and their students were expected to form an elite level of both skilled and informed members of the working class. "With our classical students," Duruy wrote in 1865, "we are often content with theory; with our professional students [i.e., students in the ecoles speciales], we shall insist on practical applications. Nothing will be left to pure speculation; instead of limiting ourselves to explaining English or German to our students from books, we shall have them speak these languages. We shall send them to the laboratory in order to perform chemical operations, into the field to make surveys, to the country to study different crops, and into the factories so that they can observe the operation of machines. In a word, instruction will be guided by a view to applications."39

3 See Bernard's comments in Miles, "Reports by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard," pp. 101- 106. Another experimental physiologist did appreciate the unity of the educational experience. Jan Evangelista Purkyne, the first exponent of institutionalized experimental physiology in the Prussian universities, zealously built a reform program upon explicit pedagogical motifs derived from elements of the Pestalozzian movement; William Coleman, "Prussian Pedagogy: Purkyne at Breslau 1823-1839," to appear in Institutes and Ideas, ed. F. L. Holmes and William Coleman (Univ. Cali- fornia Press, in press). The theme is an abiding one in the natural and especially the biomedical sciences; see, e.g., John Dewey, "Science as Subject-Matter and as Method," Science, 1910, 31:121- 127; and Donald Fleming, William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), pp. 103-105.

38 See Antoine Prost, L'histoire de l'enseignemlent en France, 1800-1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), pp. 52-54, 119-124.

39 Quoted in Clment Falcucci, L'humnanisme dans l'enseignernent secondaire en France aui XIXe siecle (Paris: Privat, 1939), p. 272. On the ecoles sp&eiales, see also Prost, L'histoire de l'enseigne-




The application in question was actually twofold. The graduate of the special school would, of course, if expectations were fulfilled, be prepared to apply his skills and knowledge in a remunerative and socially desirable (thus the minister of public instruction) manner. But his course of instruction was itself applied, that is, he learned by using his knowledge in a practical way to master the subject or problem at hand. Memory, eloquence, repetition, and speculative fancy had no place in this system of pedagogical values; initiative, self-sufficiency, sustained activity, and critical contact with theoretical principles that were well- grounded in facts did. These latter, of course, were precisely the values that informed Bernard's conception of physiology as a laboratory science. It is not extravagant to suggest that the practical motif (always tempered or augmented by a cautious engagement of theoretical issues) that directed Duruy's program for the ecoles speciales, which were intended for future technicians and man- agers, also guided his thoughts as he set about to reform French higher education.

In these matters Duruy and Bernard were truly of one mind, for both were intent upon creating institutions that would further original research.40 For Duruy, this ambition found form in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which was perhaps the greatest monument to his insight and ambition and within which Bernard's laboratory at the Museum took an early and important place. For Bernard, the university institute (the basic institutional form followed in Ger- many) or the publically funded laboratory attached to a professorial chair (the more modest French solution) was the incarnation of a research ideal that did not simply include the advance of knowledge but assured, by providing the in- spiration and means for yet another generation of investigators, the formation and above all the continuity of a scientific discipline. Bernard very rightly re- garded the "good organization of scientific instruction" as the indispensable "nursery" upon whose products the future of all natural science depended-and in France, at least, physiology still had no such pcpinicre.41 Looking to Ger- many, Bernard had seen clearly the purpose of the scientific institute and had understood very well how that purpose was being attained. These students learned by doing and, for the more talented or fortunate student, the line between learning what was already known and moving into the domain of the unknown was quickly and easily crossed.

This campaign of the last years of the Second Empire and first years of the Third Republic possesses great irony. During the 1830s and 1840s it had been German publicists who had cried out that their homeland needed elaborate facilities for scientific and medical inquiry and instruction. Their model was the

ment en France, pp. 58-60, 252-257; and Shinn, "French Science Faculty System," pp. 296-297. These schools were an integral part of Duruy's "broader effort to adapt the French educational system to modern industrial and democratic ['?] civilization, without sacrificing France's traditional cultural excellence"; C. R. Day, "Technical and Professional Education in France: the Rise and Fall of l'Enseignement Secondaire Special: 1856-1902." Jolurn-al of Social Histor-y, 1972/1973, 6:177-201 (passage cited, p. 196).

40 Duruy, however, wished to keep separate course work and other studies even for advanced students, holding research to be a different if equally important concern; Prost, L'histoire de len- seignenient en France, p. 229. The Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes was not a single institution but an assemblage of masters, laboratories, and other research facilities. Its history has yet to be written, but see ibid.; see also Jean Rohr, Victor Diuriiv, iniinistue de Napoleon III: Essai slir l( politiquie de linstruction publique ail telnps de leinpire lib/ral (Paris: Pinchon et Durand-Auzias, 1967), pp. 116-121, 196-200; and Duruy, Notes et Souvenirs, Vol. I, pp. 301-309.

" Bernard, "La medecine d'observation et la medecine experimentale." p. 103.



66 WILLIAM COLEMAN

France of the First Empire and Restoration. But as the once seemingly exemplary French institutions of science gradually decayed, individual German states were elaborating research facilities of unparalleled scope and intensity. By the late 1860s science and medicine across Europe had become a convenient tool for popular statecraft, not to mention petty nationalism; national power and prestige, especially in France and Germany, were finding a new measure.42

Some traced the dramatic ascent of Prussian military power and German economic activity to the widespread encouragement of science in these lands.43 French anxiety reached a new peak with Prussia's military humiliation of Austria at Sadowa (1866), and many efforts were made to reassert French and Imperial preeminence, not least in the arts and sciences. Amongst these was the brilliant Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1867, in emulation of the hugely successful Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Duruy at the ministry of public instruction seized the opportunity and commissioned for the year of the exposition a series of often very comprehensive reports on the progress of learning in France since the creation of the Empire. Bernard prepared the volume dealing with physiology.44 This Rapport of 1867 is at once a scientific autobiography and a finely shaped propaganda instrument.

The general message of the Rapport was, as mignt be expected, that French physiology had indeed made great progress in the preceding quarter century, but that it had done so despite inadequate facilities, appalling experimental conditions, and public neglect. Bernard was a shrewd publicist and the concluding pages of the Rapport made the disciplinary motif forcefully apparent. "If I so ardently desire that physiology in France be given the means for investigation that it possesses elsewhere," he declaimed, "it is because I have come to understand perfectly that, lacking such means, scientists are stopped in their work and contribute only a small part of what they would have been able to add to science." It follows that our "natural conclusion" must be that we must "protect French physiology and provide it with the means for progress that it lacks." More bluntly expressed, the message declared, "to advance in physiology as in all other experimental sciences two things are required: genius, and this one cannot acquire, and the means for doing work, which can be provided. French physiology asks only that which it is easy to provide; it has never lacked genius. "45

But cultural imperialism was only one element in Bernard's Rapport. This, his most personal work, also laid out in detail the now familiar arguments for the acceptance of physiology as an autonomous science and announced anew

4'2 These rivalries, acute after 1870 and bitterly hostile after 1914. are vividly portrayed by H. W. Paul, The Sorcerer's Appr-entice: The French Scientist's Inage of German Science, 1840-1919 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1972).

43 Thus Ernst Renan in 1867: "They say that the victor at Sadowa was the [Prussian] primary school teacher. Not at all, the victor in that battle was German science." Cited in Prost, L'histoire de l'enseignernent en France, p. 228.

4 Bernard, Rapportt stir les progres et la inarche de la physiologie generale en France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1867); reissued without textual alterations as De la plvsiologie generale (Paris: Hachette, 1872). The sketches for this work (Bernard, Notes) are of major importance in revealing Bernard's disciplinary purposes.

45 Bernard, De la phvsiologie gen6-ale, pp. 208-209, 211. Bernard understood very well the ni- ceties of political propaganda. In planning the Rappor-t he noted to himself that "the conclusion will be that France needs laboratories. But this should be said with due caution and in such a manner that the conclusion stands forth of itself and requires no insistence [on my part]. The point will make itself." Bernard, Notes, p. 53.




that cognitive identity necessitated the social independence of a science. Social independence meant simply that "genius" required "means for doing work," and from this claim followed the multifaceted demands for laboratory space, financial support, and the continued presence and future scientific employment of advanced students.

Bernard perhaps believed that his expectations had been met by the creation of the new laboratory at the Museum, closely tied as it was to the peculiar educational function of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Others were not yet convinced that a comprehensive regeneration of French science had truly begun. Jules Gavarret, who had begun his career as an experimental physiologist and was now a senior public official charged with supervision of medical education, observed in 1876 that in "an age when the experimental method un- questionably plays a predominant role in the scientific domain, it is difficult to understand why nothing has been prepared in our faculties to accustom our young men to observe, to compare, to reflect . . .; [it is difficult to understand] why everywhere the study of [concrete] things has been neglected and judgment sacrificed to memory. "46 This was the question that had vexed Bernard throughout his scientific career, yet it was a question that exhibited two essential but distinct dimensions in the physiologist's thought and action. The first was that of institutional legitimation and the recognition by public authorities of the importance of his subject and of the need to care for coming generations of specialists by the development of appropriate training facilities. In this respect Bernard's goals and behavior were surely little different from those of countless other ambitious scientists in France and elsewhere. They constituted an essential social dimension of discipline building.

Bernard, however, firmly believed that powerful cognitive reasons underlay these easily formulated material demands. His science was physiology; it was newly arrived at the experimental level, and experiment, he held, was the distinctive mark of the science. Chemistry, too, was experimental, but it was lim- ited in outlook; it forgot the organism itself. The pathological anatomist remem- bered the organism, but perhaps too well. Like the clinician, the anatomist halted at observation and description. Both failed to integrate the study of structure and function. In truth, they could not but fail, for such an integrated study, which itself was dictated by the conception of life that the physiologist must, in Bernard's view, hold, was uniquely suited to the multidimensional character of physiology. So powerful and far-reaching a science must now assume its rightful institutional place among the other sciences.

This argument reflected, of course, the manipulation of interests, both personal and private interests. In Bernard's case, these interests ranged from a keen sense of professional deprivation and profound respect for the purely intellectual satisfaction to be gained from science to a parochial eagerness not to permit his native France to slip behind a competitor. He entertained, too, a more expansive belief in the practical benefits that medicine would one day obtain from exacting

46 Cited in Weisz, "Reform and Conflict in French Medical Education," p. 71. Another outstanding physiologist was perhaps even less impressed by French progress: "The sumptuous rooms, the del- icate apparatus enclosed in dazzling glass cases, the gas and electrical outlets-all of these splendid instruments do not contribute very much to the discovery of new truths. What counts is the ingenuity and ardour of those who work in these laboratories. Neither Claude Bernard, nor Wurtz, nor Berthelot, nor Pasteur, nor P. Curie had at their disposition the abundant resources of ultra-modern techniques." Charles Richet, Souvenirs d'un phvsiologiste (Paris: J. Peyronnet, 1933), pp. 67-68.



68 WILLIAM COLEMAN

and only seemingly impractical physiological research. His motives were thus several, and these are easily discerned in the various turns of his arguments for disciplinary autonomy.

One also needs to ask what expectations were held by the person to whom, above all others, such arguments were addressed, namely, Duruy. Bernard's peak years of disciplinary demands coincided with Duruy's term as minister of public instruction (1863-1869), and the values of the latter were such as to make Bernard's ambitions for physiology peculiarly attractive. Like Bernard, Duruy adopted a cautious liberal position.47 He deplored the excesses of the early Em- pire, but even more he distrusted democratic or egalitarian government. He was raised to respect the popular Napoleonic tradition, in which patriotism, anti- clericalism, and cultural and economic progress occupied a prominent place. Duruy valued education because it served as the principal instrument for the expansion of morality and the cultivation of intelligence in the population. As befitted a hierarchical society, he conceived of distinct stages in the educational process. Bernard's demands agreed perfectly with Duruy's program, the laboratory ideal fitting into the highest stage of the educational process, that in which innovation was encouraged at the same time that the process of education continued. Of course, Bernard's own rigorously secular outlook, conservative lib- eralism, and moderate nationalism rendered him a particularly welcome figure amongst Duruy's associates. From Bernard and his program Duruy could expect an important contribution to the major task of reconstructing French educational activities, an influential ally in the difficult years of the late, so-called liberal Empire and the satisfaction of seeing France assume again her accustomed lead- ership in the affairs of the intellect. More broadly viewed, there was, too, the promise held out by Bernard and his prospective students that their discoveries would be important contributions to medical science and especially to medical practice-and thus an emblem of France in peaceful international endeavor. They would, in fact, constitute a good in their own right.48

As noted at the outset, the problem of discipline formation has been approached primarily as a matter of social organization. The concept of the discipline, indeed the word itself, demands at least a minimal level of social organization. The discipline represents a small (or large) community of scientists, their institutions and material; the means, notably publication and instruction, that they possess to disseminate their views to a wider community; and the sustained relations with those authorities who exert an influence over the discipline's activities or provide its funding and usually both.49

47 Duruy's social and political values are presented by Rohr, Victor Dlurlv, pp. 20-25. Duruy was startlingly candid regarding his low opinion of French physicians and his great admiration for German scientists. See Hermann von Helmholtz to Anna Helmholz 20 Apr. 1866, in Anna von Helmnholtz: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen, 2 vols., ed. Ellen von Siemens-Helmholtz (Leipzig: Von Hase & Koehler, 1929), Vol. I, pp. 133-134. I thank Timothy Lenoir for this reference.

48 Olmsted and Olmsted (Claiude Bernard, pp. 162-165) describe the physiologist's quiet politics and acceptance of the Empire. The Notes (cit. n. 16), as Grmek indicates (pp. 16, 59), reveal that Bernard's patriotic sensibilities were great indeed but not marked by the harshness that informed, for example, the comments of Pasteur on German science and Germany. On the valuation of so- called "pure" science in nineteenth-century France, see the suggestions of Albert Cassagne in La theorie de l'art poiur l'atrt en France chez7 les dernliers rornantiques et les premiers realistes (Paris: Hachette, 1906), pp. 262-294.

49 "Discipline" stands etymologically close to activity, to the "practice or exercise" of the student or "disciple," and opposed to "dogma," the concern of the "teacher or doctor." It reflects a self- involved program of learning and concerns, in general, a specialized "body" of belief or knowledge.




The question does arise, however, why one would elect to explore the scientific disciplinary phenomenon at all, if in fact attention is turned solely to social parameters; many another trade or specialized undertaking would suffice, and analysis would surely be made easier by the absence of highly intellectual- ized discourse, jargon, or worse. But "science" is obviously both the goal and the prize: one wishes to speak meaningfully of the growth of science (here often made into a conceptual monolith and thus the source of a host of new problems) and to establish and delineate the mode of action of varied factors that direct such growth. This is an ambitious goal and one that promises useful lessons for policy decisions. But however strong the program for a sociology of science, one's vigor will be constantly sapped by inattention to the cognitive dimensions of the enterprise. Studer and Chubin, once launched upon their account of viral cell transformation, found themselves driven upon the rescuing reef of a "w'eak version of what has been popularized as 'the strong program in the sociology of knowledge."'50 My own ship, of course, set sail from a different port and, while exposed to risks of its own, has instructed its crew to keep a sharp lookout for suggestive traces of the discipline, not to assume that it has already been located and needs only further circumscription.

This assessment and these conclusions may find critics, and I shall not presume to anticipate their objections. It is evident that I am assigning an indispensable role to cognitive content in the analysis of the disciplinary phenomenon; indeed, I reverse the usual order and give it the "privileged" position in historical analysis that proponents of a strong sociological program have often reserved for strictly social factors.51 But in this 1 have, in fact, often been an- ticipated. To Bernard's claims may be added, for example, Liebig's own multifaceted campaign to create the discipline of agricultural chemistry. Here, too, cognitive identity grew along with increasingly specialized technical inquiries. Disciplinary definition by limitation was practiced, and disciplinary formation was made critically dependent upon the creation of distinctive educational activities tied closely to the cognitive program. In another domain, L. S. Jacyna has shown how in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s those seeking the autonomy of physiology, which faced as usual the conventional expectations of medicine, did so by presenting a cognitive definition of the discipline. The British proponents defended the independence of physiology not, as Bernard had done, by vaunting experiment and joining determinismne with a phenomenological account of life, but by putting forth the notion of the cell and its behavior as the crucial vital phenomenon, with which, of course, only physiology was competent to deal. Once more in regard to physiology, G. L. Geison has exhibited how a Cambridge school of physiology emerged under the clear-sighted patronage of

Already in the late 17th century, the word was being used by Robert Boyle to describe special areas of natural philosophy ("Opticks, Astronomy, Hydrostaticks, and Mechanicks"); Oxfr rd English Dic- tionary, "Discipline, 2."

50 Studer and Chubin, The Cancer Mission, p. 250. 5' Shapin throughout "History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions" grants the (am-

biguous) notion of "privileged" a strong argumentative role. Despite this and his avowed principal purpose of examining "scientific knowledge as a social product." he speaks generously of cognitive factors (pp. 171-172, 189) and expresses himself cautiously on the main point: "Even the most technical and esoteric scientific activities may need to be referred to wider social interests" (p. 191). Mendelsohn, too, qualifies the implied force of his title: "What I have tried to illustrate . . . is the manner in which forces active in the social order played a critical role (though not the only role) in the establishment of the scientific way of knowing-the epistemology of modern science", "The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge," p. 19.



70 WILLIAM COLEMAN

Michael Foster and was guided by Foster's own principal interest, the nature and control of the heartbeat. From this school, whose social identity and research methods became manifest as it pursued a definite cognitive purpose, emerged a new view of cardiovascular physiology and also a new generation of now-experimental British physiologists. One may also note the disciplinary motif in the assertion of the primacy of teleomechanical explanation by the Gottingen school of physiology, and especially the exposition of the cognitive foundations upon which alone, some claimed, a science and school of ecology could arise, this being the notorious program of the influential American botanist, F. C. Clements.52

This perspective permits a sharper statement of conclusions. It is nature, the perceived phenomena, the organism as an integral living being, that gave definition to this discipline-building program. The study of physiology constituted nothing less than a sustained interaction between investigator and the investi- gated. Both were active, and the latter, although in one sense a given, in another sense acquired meaning only as the former applied his skills to the task of investigation. Investigation, however, also means process, and in physiology as in other realms of natural science that process is not a simple one. It entails an increasingly elaborate social dimension, expressed in this case in terms of the laboratory and its supporting installations and personnel. This program of justification and demand proceeded upon methodological grounds. Bernard's claims were deeply rooted in the technical culture of science, not only in experimental instruments but in the closely related philosophical instrumentalism that constituted his theory of knowledge, thus becoming the absolute precondition for valid scientific contact with and subsequent understanding of vital processes.53 For Bernard, a conception of life and the determination of the most suitable method, namely, experimentation, for ascertaining the character of the phenomena of life constituted the foundations of a discipline. Physiology assumed full disciplinary character, however, only when means for the all-important educational function of the laboratory had been provided. Here a corps of serious new investigators was trained. By these means the discipline acquired its indispensable disciples, and both discipline and disciples could look forward to an assured future, secure in distinctive scientific interests and protected and nur- tured by a society that believed, or was persuaded that it believed, in the worth of the product.

52 See Wolfgang Krohn and Wolf Shafer, "The Origins and Structure of Agricultural Chemistry," in Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, ed. Gerard Lemaine et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), pp. 27-52; L. S. Jacyna, "The Romantic Programme and the Reception of Cell Theory in Britain," Journal of the History of Biology, 1984. 17:13-48; G. L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Societv (Princeton Univ. Press, 1978); Lenoir, The Strategy of Life (cit. n. 7); and R. C. Tobey, Saiving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Fouinding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1981). See also G. L. Geison, '"Scientific Change, Emerging Specialties, and Research Schools," Hist. Sci., 1981, 19:20-40.

13 Technical culture penetrated throughout the sciences and was the product of diverse figures in physics and industry as well as in physiology. A brief but broad view of these developments is given by K. E. Rothschuh, "Die Bedeutung apparativer Hilfsmittel fur die Entwicklung der biologischen Wissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert,' in Naturwissenschaft, Technik uind Wirtschaft im 19. Jahr- hundert, ed. Wilhelm Treue and Kurt Mavel (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), pp. 159- 181. As might be expected, Bernard distrusted the loss of immediacy of experience that use of merely physical means entailed (ibid., p. 173, n. 37a). Instrumentation has subsequently all but over- whelmed not only physiological and medical research but also medical practice; see S. J. Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978).



the cognitive basis of the discipline: claude bernard on physiology

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