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Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his life. Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met Magendie?
The great Magendie, of France, who long stood at the very head of Physiology and Pathology in the French Academy which, by the way, has claimed to be, and perhaps is, the most learned body of men in the world performed this experiment. He divided the patients of one of the large Paris hospitals into three classes. To one he prescribed the common remedies of the books.
Prominent among the unprejudiced class of workers who now appeared was the brilliant young Frenchman Louis Antoine Desmoulins, who studied first under the tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance.
There is a terrible parallax between the period before thirty and that after threescore and ten, as two men of those ages look, one with naked eyes, one through his spectacles, at the man of fifty and thereabout. Magendie, I doubt not you have all heard of. I attended but one of his lectures.
Chief of these, during the middle period of the century, was the man who is sometimes spoken of as the "father of brain physiology," Marie Jean Pierre Flourens, of the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, the pupil and worthy successor of Magendie.
Magendie was President; Regnal, Secretary; besides Rayer, the renowned comparative pathologist; Yvart, the Inspector-General of the Imperial Veterinary Schools; Renault, Inspector of the Imperial Veterinary Schools; Delafond, Director of Alfort College; Bouley, Lassaigne, Baudemont, Doyére, Manny de Morny, and a few others representing the public.
And of those who took no medicine, he lost none. And what opinion has Magendie left on record of the popular healing art? He said to his medical class, "Gentlemen, medicine is a great humbug." In the face of such damaging testimony from prominent representatives of the medical profession, it becomes exceedingly difficult to place any reliance on the drug remedies prescribed by them.
But in 1823 the subject was taken up by the recognized leader of French physiology Francois Magendie in the course of his comprehensive experimental studies of the nervous system, and Bell's conclusions were subjected to the most rigid experimental tests and found altogether valid.
ONE of the greatest contributions of the nineteenth century to scientific medicine was the discovery of the internal secretions of organs. The basic work on the subject was done by Claude Bernard, a pupil of the great Magendie, whose saying it is well to remember "When entering a laboratory one should leave theories in the cloakroom."
Experimenters everywhere soon confirmed the observations of Bell and Magendie, and, as always happens after a great discovery, a fresh impulse was given to investigations in allied fields. Nevertheless, a full decade elapsed before another discovery of comparable importance was made.
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