ENTER CLAUDE BERNARD

Science is supposed to be immune to the personal prejudices and emotional habits of the vulgar.  It is the tradition that a new contribution to knowledge emerging from no matter how obscure the source, should be hailed as a gift from the gods.  But the sad truth of the matter is that a new finding in science requires as much backing as a new project in high finance or social climbing.  Berthold, like Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a great pioneer.  But there was no personage, no person of consequence, with no patronage by anyone of consequence, no wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate him.  His poor four little pages of a report, published ten years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” attracted not the slightest notice.  Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of possibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have been interested enough to read it, but without any recorded reaction on the part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan.  Though it was good, original, conclusive stuff, it was cut dead, absolutely, by the scientific world.  As a result, forty years elapsed before the implications of his studies were rediscovered by the Columbus of the modern approach to the internal secretions, the American Frenchman, Brown-Sequard.

It took a first class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system and a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doctrine of the internal secretions, so that people began to sit up and listen and take sides—­on the wrong grounds.  This Frenchman was Claude Bernard.  At a series of lectures on experimental physiology delivered at the College of France, in 1855, he coined the terms internal secretion and external secretion and emphasized the opposition between them, on the basis of an incorrect example, the function of the liver in the supply of sugar to the blood.

Just as Columbus reached America, carried on a series of logical syllogisms, built upon unreal pictures of a straight path to the East, Claude Bernard opened up the continent of the internal secretions to the experimental enthusiasts of his time by a discovery which today is not grouped among the phenomena of internal secretion at all.  In attempting to throw light upon the disease diabetes, in which there is a loss of the normal ability of the cells to burn up sugar, he examined the sugar content of the blood in different regions of the body.  He found that the blood of the veins, in general, contained less sugar than the blood of the arteries, which meant that sugar was taken from the blood in passing through the tissues.  But the venous blood of the right side of the heart contained as much sugar as the arterial blood.  Evidently, somewhere, sugar was added to the blood in the veins before it got to the heart.  The blood of the vein which goes from the liver to