Claude Bernard - Experimental Medicine

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We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory.

Claude Bernard
It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.

Claude Bernard
In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis.

Claude Bernard
But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

Claude Bernard
Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.

Claude Bernard
Our feelings lead us at first to believe that absolute truth must lie within our realm; but study takes from us, little by little, these chimerical conceits.

Claude Bernard
If an idea presents itself to us, we must not reject it simply because it does not agree with the logical deductions of a reigning theory.

Claude Bernard
We must keep our freedom of mind,... and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

Claude Bernard
I do not understand how we can teach practical and exact science on the basis of statistics.

Claude Bernard
An experiment is fundamentally just an observation induced with some object or another.

Claude Bernard
Considered in itself, the experimental method is nothing but reasoning by whose help we methodically submit our ideas to experience — the experience of fact.

Claude Bernard
Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined, can we compile; we must learn, therefore, that we compile statistics only when we cannot possibly help it.

Claude Bernard
Observation, then, is what shows facts.; experiment is what teaches about facts and gives experience in relation to anything.

Claude Bernard
In these researches I followed the principles of the experimental method that we have established, i.e., that, in presence of a well-noted, new fact which contradicts a theory, instead of keeping the theory and abandoning the fact, I should keep and study the fact, and I hastened to give up the theory.

Claude Bernard
The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from winch the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.

Claude Bernard
Men sometimes seem to confuse experiment with observation.

Claude Bernard
I believe, in a word, that the true scientific method confines the mind without suffocating it, leaves it as far as possible face to face with itself, and guides it, while respecting the creative originality and the spontaneity which are its most precious qualities.

Claude Bernard
Pile up facts or observations as we may, we shall be none the wiser. To learn, we must necessarily reason about what we have observed, compare the facts and judge them by other facts used as controls.

Claude Bernard
I can no more accept a philosophy, then, which tries to assign boundaries to science, than a science which claims to suppress philosophic truths that are at present outside its own domain.

Claude Bernard
A theory is merely a scientific idea controlled by experiment.

Claude Bernard
In my opinion the true scientific spirit is that whose high aspiration fertilize the sciences and draw them on in search of truths which are still beyond them but which must not be suppressed, because they have been attacked by stronger and more delicate philosophic minds.

Claude Bernard
Facts never exclude one another, they are simply explained by differences in the conditions in which they are born.

Claude Bernard
Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. It is in the darker. It is in the darker regions of science that great men are recognized; they are marked by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure and carry science forward.

Claude Bernard
When one calls a new fact a discovery, the fact itself is not a discovery, but rather the new idea derived from it...

Claude Bernard