Blood : a study in general physiology / by Lawrence J. Henderson.

  • Lawrence Joseph Henderson
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Blood : a study in general physiology / by Lawrence J. Henderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    covered among inorganic phenomena. But in the living being they are also always harmoniously organized and integrated, and this is their most striking characteristic. It gives rise to the central problem of general physiology. Especially with the help of his theory of the milieu in- terieur, Claude Bernard was able to treat many facts, including his own discoveries, from this point of view and thus to embody in durable form ideas which were in ad¬ vance both of the spirit of his contemporaries and of his own physico-chemical knowledge. At the same time Gibbs’s memoir 4 ‘ On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances” was in course of publi¬ cation in the Proceedings of the Connecticut Academy.5 This mathematical research, the greatest effort of sus¬ tained abstract thinking in the history of America, was destined to awaken chemists from their empirical slum¬ bers and to make possible the study of the problems of general physiology at their deepest level, as Claude Ber¬ nard had conceived them, to provide a foundation, in short, on which a rational science of general physiology could be reared. But the twentieth century had begun be¬ fore physiologists were ready to make use of the theories of Bernard and Gibbs. Even today, in spite of many scat¬ tered investigations and of the influence of the important treatise of Bayliss,6 the science is still in its infancy. Its significance is now widely recognized, but Claude Ber¬ nard’s program has already grown old and has not been revised. A fresh survey of the field is needed. For Claude Bernard, “General Physiology is the fun¬ damental biological science toward which all the others converge. Its problem consists in determining the ele¬ mentary condition of the phenomena of life.”7 To this statement there is probably less objection today than 5 J. Willard Gibbs, Scientific Papers, I, 55, London, 1906. 6 W. M. Bayliss, Principles of General Physiology, 1st ed., London, 1915. 7 C. Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (tr. by H. C. Greene), p. 65, New York, 1926.
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