July 21, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
How Claude Bernard Established His Laboratory
Marie’s father was a wealthy physician who
provided both for Bernard’s education and his research and Barnard had married
her precisely for this reason; it was a marriage of convenience for him.
Besides his wife Marie Bernard managed to
garner yet another source to establish his laboratory.
Napolean III who after an interview with
him in 1864 where Bernard effectively explained his impediments to research provided
him with a well furnished laboratory in the French National Museum of Natural
History in the Jardin des Plantes (Garden of the Plants), which is the main
botanical garden of France.
Today it is a part of French National Museum
of Natural History (MNHN) which in turn is one of the public institutions or grands
etablissements of the Ministry of National Education and Research.
Eventually Bernard’s wife Marie separated
from him as under no condition was Bernard ready to give up his work on physiological
experiments which entailed surgeries on animals and larger mammals including
dogs without anesthesia to which most humans have strong emotional bonding.
Anesthesia through chloroform was just
being discovered about that time and even that carried risks of death when not
administered in right doses.
The first comprehensive textbook on the
subject of anesthesia was published only in 1914 and so it was not surprising
that Bernard performed most of his surgical procedures on animals without any anesthesia
on them.
Even today much of experimental work on
animal subjects does not entail anesthetizing them.
It is indeed not easy to cull the animals
or perform painful experiments on animals as I found while working with New
Zealand breed of rabbits at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Yet Bernard was a revolutionary man of
medical science who Bernard Cohen, professor of the history of science at
Harvard University, has called “one of the greatest of all men of science.”
To him vivisection was fundamental to the
study of physiological processes that occur in animals and humans.
His experiments disgusted not only his wife
and daughters but even some of his student physicians who happened to work in
his lab.
A physician by the name of George Hoggan
who had spent four months working in the Bernard’s laboratory and later wrote
about the experiments that decidedly moved him:
He wrote that his experience at the lab made
him “prepared to see not only science, but even mankind, perish rather than
have recourse to such means of saving it.”
But Bernard held strong contradictory views
and professed the science of vivisection with great enthusiasm.
This is what he had to say about his work
which appeared barbaric, bloody and cruel to the world (as it still does today
as evident by the protests of animal liberation movement against not only animal
experimentation specifically but animal exploitation generally).
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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