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Much has been written on Claude Bernard as a relentless promoter of the experimental method in physiology. Although the paper will touch Bernard's experimental intuitions and his experimental practice as well, its focus is slightly different. It will address the laboratory, that is, the space in which experimentation in the life sciences takes place, and it will analyze the scattered remarks that Bernard made on the topic both in his books and in his posthumously published writings. The paper is divided into four parts. The introduction briefly sketches the coming into being of the physiological laboratory in the first half of the nineteenth century. The second section will give an overview of Claude Bernard's own itinerary in physiology and his personal laboratory experience. The third part of the paper will have a look at the image of the laboratory that Claude depicted in his Introduction to Experimental Medicine. In the subsequent section and by contrast, the image of the laboratory will come into focus as it can be reconstructed from Bernard's notebook that he kept between 1850 and 1860, the Cahier rouge. Finally, the fifth part of the paper will spotlight Claude Bernard's comparison of the sciences and the arts and their respective practices. A brief concluding statement tries to summarize Bernard's epistemological position toward experimentally practiced science., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Heredity has been dismissed as an insignificant object in Claude Bernard's physiology, and the topic is usually ignored by historians. Yet, thirty years ago, Jean Gayon demonstrated that Bernard did elaborate on the subject. The present paper aims at reassessing the issue of heredity in Claude Bernard's project of a "general physiology". My first claim is that Bernard's interest in heredity was linked to his ambitious goal of redefining general physiology in relation to morphology. In 1867, not only was morphology included within experimental physiology, but it also theoretically grounded physiological investigations. By 1878, morphology and physiology were considered as completely independent sciences, and only the latter was perceived as suitable to experimentation. My second claim is that this reversal reflected the existence of two opposite attitudes towards heredity. In the late 1860s, Bernard was convinced that heredity would soon be accessible to experimental manipulation and that new species would be produced in the laboratory exactly like organic chemistry succeeded to do for raw bodies. Ten years later, he ascertained that this was impossible. My third claim is that Bernard was epistemologically ill-equipped to address the issue of heredity. Bernard was strongly committed to a general reasoning scheme that acknowledged only three categories: determining conditions, constant laws and phenomena. This scheme was a key factor in his successes as a physiologist who was able to capture new mechanisms in living bodies. Nonetheless, it also prevented him from understanding how time and history could be endowed with a causal action that cannot be reduced to timeless parameters., (© 2023. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France's Foucauldian heritage: (1) while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; (2) One of these failures concerns the government's inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us?

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon's and Bonnet's, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff's embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process.

The paper describes how, in the context of the development of the French human sciences (sciences de l'homme) around 1800, the reference to the Reign of Terror was constitutive for the formulation and legitimation of a procedure, which was based on what Jean-Étienne Esquirol called "moral shocks" (sécousse morale). The psychiatric and pedagogical discussion of non-physical effects on the spirit (esprit) of human subjects and patients essentially dealt with the question: could people have been liberated by the shocking surge of the Revolution from the demeaning and dependent habits of the Old Regime (ancien régime), or could this violent revolution have had a pathological effect? This article shows that, after 1800, the latter interpretation became accepted. A professional self-image of psychiatric and pedagogical expertise formed in the relationship between physician and patient or teacher and student. This expertise justified employing shocks in professionally controlled settings, while the healing power of the revolutionary was negated. This article thereby distinguishes between four different perspectives on the pathological or healing effect of what was perceived as a "revolutionary shock": firstly, a positive perspective that interprets the shock of the Revolution as healthy, stimulating the vital forces of the people languishing in inactivity; secondly, a cautious perspective that emphasizes the necessity of curbing and controlling the passions of the people; thirdly, a perspective that recognizes in the outburst of passions an aberration from the natural state, and fourthly, a therapeutic perspective that recommends the use of passions by experts in very controlled spaces. Based on published texts and material from the Archives nationales as well as the Institut national de jeunes sourds, this article provides a political history of the development of moral shocks and argues that the development of epistemological and therapeutic technologies in the human sciences were essentially the result of a demarcation from revolutionary violence as well as the desire in the human sciences for a stable government.

Louis Pasteur's defeat of belief in spontaneous generation has been a classical rationalist example of how the experimental approach of modern science can reveal superstition. Farley and Geison (Bull Hist Med 48:161-198, 1974) told a counter-story of how Pasteur's success was due to political and ideological support rather than superior experimental science. They claimed that Pasteur violated proper norms of scientific method, and that the French Academy of Science did not see this, or did not want to. Farley and Geison argued that Pouchet's experiments were as valid as those of Pasteur. In this paper I argue that the core of the scientific debate was not general theories for or against spontaneous generation but the outcome of specific experiments. It was on the conduct of these experiments that the Academy made judgements favorable to Pasteur. Claude Bernard was a colleague of Pasteur, supportive and sometimes critical. I argue that Bernard's fact-oriented methodology of "experimental medicine" is a better guide to explaining the controversy than the hypothetic-deductive view of scientific method typical of logical empiricism.

In this paper, we reflect on the connection between the notions of organism and organisation, with a specific interest in how this bears upon the issue of the reality of the organism (or in contrast the status of these notions as constructs, whether heuristic or otherwise scientifically useful). We do this by presenting the case of Buffon, who developed complex views about the relation between the notions of "organised" and "organic" matter. We argue that, contrary to what some interpreters have suggested, these notions are not orthogonal in his thought. Also, we argue that Buffon has a view in which organisation is not just ubiquitous, but basic and fundamental in nature, and hence also fully natural. We suggest that he can hold this view because of his anti-mathematicism. Buffon's case is interesting, in our view, because he can regard organisation, and organisms, as perfectly natural, and can admit their reality without invoking problematic supernaturalist views, and because he allows organisation and the organismal to come in kinds and degrees. Thus, his view tries to do justice to two cautionary notes for the debate on the reality of the organism: the need for a commitment to a broadly naturalist perspective, and the need to acknowledge the interesting features of organisms through which we make sense of them.

This paper considers the theoretical circumstances that urged Michel Foucault to analyse modern societies in terms of biopower. Georges Canguilhem's account of the relations between science and the living forms an essential starting point for Foucault's own later explorations, though the challenges posed by the molecular revolution in biology and François Jacob's history of it allowed Foucault to extend and transform Canguilhem's philosophy of error. Using archival research into his 1955-1956 course on "Science and Error," I show that, for Canguilhem, it is inauthentic to treat a living being as an error, even if living things are capable of making errors in the domain of knowledge. The emergent molecular biology in the 1960s posed a grave challenge, however, since it suggested that individuals could indeed be errors of genetic reproduction. The paper discusses how Canguilhem and Foucault each responded to this by examining, among other texts, their respective reviews of Jacob's The Logic of the Living. For Canguilhem this was an opportunity to reaffirm the creativity of life in the living individual, which is not a thing to be evaluated, but the source of values. For Foucault, drawing on Jacob's work, this was the opportunity to develop a transformed account of valuation by posing biopower as the DNA of society. Despite their disagreements, the paper examines these three authors as different iterations of a historical epistemology attuned to errancy, error, and experimentation.

For most of his scientific career, Jacques Monod appeared to be a man of a single problem: the formation of enzymes and the regulation of their properties. His ability to produce theoretical models led him to play a major role in both the discovery of the operon regulation and the model of allosteric transitions. The successes of Monod, from the 1950s to the Noble Prize (1965), are already well documented. In this paper, I will focus on the Monod before Monod, that is, the Monod who, during the 1940s, tried to explain the fundamental phenomenon of enzymatic adaptation. To begin with, however, I will survey how this phenomenon was discovered and explained by French Pasteurians at the very beginning of the twentieth century. This first explanation took place amidst an entrenched Lamarckian atmosphere in French thought, which was still alive during the 1920s and the 1930s, when Monod commenced the study of biology at the Sorbonne. Because of his will to construct a scientific biology free from teleology, Monod always tried to break from the legacy of this traditional background of Lamarckism, and he consequently developed ways of thinking that, in the main, were not part of the French biological tradition. Nevertheless, one point did link Monod to French history: his fruitful interactions with André Lwoff. As we shall see, these interactions were necessary for the development of Monod's science, both technically and intellectually speaking.

Histopathologists have been interested in cancer since the beginning of cellular theory. Rudolf Virchow and Julius Cohnheim defined cancer as a disease due to specific changes in tissues; cancer was thus considered a "pathologist's disease." Virchow emphasized the principles of biopsy and its value in the diagnosis of malignant tumours, but he himself did not promote it as an instrument for diagnosis. In the nineteenth century, in fact, cancer was a pathologists' disease in research only, not in diagnosis. By the mid-twentieth century, pathologists figured in medical practice as mediators between alternative therapeutic solutions. Histopathology entered a new arena, medical practice. In this paper, the process through which microscope slides moved from histopathology research to medical practice will be explored in detail with the aim of understanding how medical research integrates routine medical practices. The quasi-inherent character of scientific knowledge as relevant to medical practice is not taken for granted here. Through a study of medical school laboratory records from the interwar period in Strasbourg, I argue that pathologists could direct patients to specific forms of therapy on the basis of microscopic slides of cancer cells because they had defined (and re-defined) cancers by contributing to establishing radiation therapy practices.

Since the end of the 1990s, the practice of biobanking--performed in and by actors called biobanks--has become a key practice for the life sciences and the biotechnologies, though the practice of biobanking is far from being something entirely new. Its significance, however, is indeed new, in the sense that the biological material and associated data collected in, and manipulated by, well-organised and often highly specialised facilities is transformed into an (epistemic) object with biovalue. In other words, the practice of biobanking signifies not only the collection, manipulation, and distribution of biological material and associated data in an organised manner involving various actors that govern or use the services of a biobank. Rather, it produces biobanks as sites of co-production of data-driven scientific knowledge. My paper draws on case studies of the history and practices of Généthon DNA and Cell Bank, the Biobank of Picardie, and the Tumour Bank of the Saint-Louis Hospital in a comparative manner. It presents biobanking as both a contingent practice and of an open, experimental character and concludes that it is transforming into a data-driven practice pursued in an industrialized manner.

Based upon flyers and advertisements for the contraceptive pill from 1961 until 2005, this paper discusses the ways in which the drug and its female users were represented in the marketing of two West European countries, France and the German Federal Republic. As my analysis suggests, national differences are only discernible in the marketing until the end of the 1970s. In West Germany, the pill was depicted from early on as a contraceptive, whereas, due to the restrictive legal situation, in France the pill was marketed as a multi-purpose drug. Nevertheless, the sources in both countries emphasized the safety of the drug. Likewise the representations of women changed from the notion of the married mother to a more diverse image, including young, modern and active women. From the early 1980s on, French and German materials conformed to one another. Now more classification systems were developed, emphasizing the differences between types of pills and types of women. Lifestyle, leisure and fun became increasingly central topics. Correspondingly, the female user was often portrayed in a sexualized way and represented as an active consumer with individual needs and wishes.

In recent years scientists have created genetically modified pigs for the purpose of xenotransplantations. These are transplants of animal organs into human patients. But xenotransplantation has a long history. Since the early twentieth century, many surgeons tried to insert animal organs into human and non-human bodies. This paper examines the controversies that these innovations have caused in the United States and France, including the notion of the objectification of animals. Three phases are described. The historical review shows that far from the choice of pigs being "natural" it turns out to be recent and to follow controversies surrounding the possible use of primates. During the last phase, the scientists have internalized the "animal issue" in their practice: the official donor is now the pig, and the animals are treated respectfully during all the lab manipulations. Since pigs are different from humans they can be objectified and thus absorbed. This objective distance is, however, threatened by new discourses on animal rights, by genetic manipulations that "humanise" pigs, and by scientific practice itself that recognizes a moral proximity between pigs and men.

Modern physics was born in the 17th century and modern biology one century later. Immediately, scientifics and philosophers ask themselves what is the relationship between those two sciences and between properties of non-living and living matter. Among those scientifics and philosophers, some think that mental phenomena are of biological nature--they are materialists--so they encounter a second problem: what is the relationship between properties of non-thinking and thinking living matter? This paper examines the doctrine of three French philosophers of the (post-) Enlightenment on those subjects: Diderot, Cabanis and Lamarck, and, as their answer is in terms of causality and supervenience, I compare succinctly their doctrine with those of Searle and Kim.

This paper compares anti-hookworm campaigns conducted in the early twentieth century in France, Germany, Brazil and West India. The populations that suffer from hookworm are not identical in the North and in the South. In tropical and semi-tropical regions hookworm is mainly found among poor peasants and is related to lack of hygiene, while in temperate climates hookworm was a professional disease of miners, a highly organized professional segment. Nevertheless, major disparities in the pattern of hookworm control did not reflect the North-South divide, but a difference between campaigns. These aimed at the eradication of hookworm infection (Germany and West-India) and at alleviating the effects of this infection on populations (France and Brazil). Maps that represented the prevalence of hookworm mirrored the aims of the sanitary campaign in which they were used: eradication of parasitic worms versus the reduction of the handicap induced by these worms. In public health as well, representing is intervening. And vice versa: patterns of intervention shape representations.

The paper focuses on Pasteur's public experimentation of the anthrax vaccine (Pouilly-le-Fort, 1881) as portrayed in the English and French popular press of the time. It is argued that this 'popular' level of representation did not merely provide additional publicity for Pasteur's ideas. Rather, the nature and meaning of the experiment itself and of the related controversy on immunisation were substantially negotiated and shaped within the public arena. The multifold consequences of this framing at the public level are explored. In particular, attention is drawn to the relationships that in such process were established with other issues debated at the same time in the arena, namely homeopathy, vivisection and vaccination.

This paper provides an overview of the development of typhus vaccines between the first and second world wars. It is shown that there was a shift in the classification of the causal Rickettsiae from being classed as bacteria to being conceptualised as a type of virus. This 'paradigm switch' stimulated interest in the possibility of producing an effective medicine.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the one hundred years of vaccination that has passed since Louis Pasteur first coined this generic term. According to the late Jonas Salk, vaccinology is a science encompassing all aspects of vaccine from its conception in the laboratory to its production by companies and its application and distribution in the field. In this historical survey I explore how vaccination never consisted of a simple and uniform application of a rational model, but rather diverged along various pathways, several of which were discarded in retrospect as being hazardous, and I analyse the ongoing interplay between rational and inventive thinking.

There is a longstanding and ongoing controversy about whether Buffon is to be regarded as a forerunner of evolutionism in the eighteenth century, or even as one of the founders of transformistic biology. There are good reasons to deny this claim. There are good reasons even to deny that the question which is going to be answered negatively is of particular importance. The present paper addresses the issue from a different angle. It analyzes the concept of time operative in the natural history writings of Buffon, and it delineates the articulation of the concepts of time, change, and history with its organizing impact on Buffon's discourse on earth and organisms. It is argued that although with his species concept Buffon tries to introduce the classical notion of a physical system into biology, in order to do so, he has to subvert it by an element of time. This guides him in considering various aspects of organic change, but by itself does not lead to a general perspective of transformation. On the other hand, in his Epoques de la nature, Buffon introduces a general law of geological change, thus arriving at something which could be called a physically intelligible history. The conquest of natural history by physics, in one and the same movement, leads to a subversion of physical geology by history, and prevents biology from becoming evolutionistic in the sense in which the nineteenth century understands this term.