structural:summarization, structural:scholar_edition
Works

Patron Claude Bernard's aim, as he stated in his own words, was to establish the use of the scientific method in medicine. He dismissed several previous misconceptions, questioned common presumptions, and relied on experimentation.

Claude Bernard's first important work was on the functions of the pancreas, the juice of which he proved to be of great significance in the process of digestion; this achievement won him the prize for experimental physiology from the French Academy of Sciences.

A second investigation – perhaps his most famous – was on the glycogenic function of the liver; in the course of his study he was led to the conclusion, which throws light on the causation of diabetes mellitus, that the liver, in addition to secreting bile, is the seat of an internal secretion, by which it prepares sugar at the expense of the elements of the blood passing through it.

A third research resulted in the discovery of the vasomotor system. In 1851, while examining the effects produced in the temperature of various parts of the body by section of the nerve or nerves belonging to them, he noticed that division of the cervical sympathetic nerve gave rise to more active circulation and more forcible pulsation of the arteries in certain parts of the head, and a few months afterwards he observed that electrical excitation of the upper portion of the divided nerve had the contrary effect. In this way he established the existence of both vasodilator and vasoconstrictor nerves.

The study of the physiological action of poisons was also of great interest to him, his attention being devoted in particular to curare and carbon monoxide gas. Bernard is widely credited with first describing carbon monoxide's affinity for hemoglobin in 1857, although James Watt had drawn similar conclusions about hydrocarbonate 's affinity for blood acting as "an antidote to the oxygen" in 1794 prior to the discoveries of carbon monoxide and hemoglobin.