Experimental medicine

"Stewart Wolf suggests that Claude Bernard's genius in physiological experimentation is similar to the extraordinary Sherlock Holmes' capacity to solve crimes and William Osler's uncanny abilities in clinical diagnosis. Like both of those creative searchers, Claude Bernard typically focused on findings that did not accord with prevailing theory. His curiosity led him to attempt to explain the finding by a tentative hypothesis; he would then devise an experiment. Although he sought for a quantitative result that might serve as a basis of a theory, he had little confidence in statistics as a guide to certainty. Bernard's opposition to scientists' prevailing habit of segregating their inquiries into systems rather than studying the unified organism is particularly striking. This volume will be important for those in the medical field as well as those interested in the history of science."--BOOK JACKET.