an introduction to the study of experimental medicine (dover books on biology)

work-as-meaning

• Weightier still are the contentment which comes from work well done, the sense of the value of science for its own sake, insatiable curiosity and the pleasure of masterly performance.

  ISEM-RC-015

• The truly scientific spirit should make us modest and kindly. We really know very little, and we are all fallible when facing the immense difficulties of natural phenomena.

  ISEM-RC-054

faith-and-doubt

• Vitalistic ideas are a kind of medical superstition — a belief in the supernatural. Confidence in absolute determinism leads, on the contrary, to real science.

  ISEM-RC-080

• Vitalists attribute to living bodies a vital force ceaselessly at war with physico-chemical forces — an idea Bernard systematically dismantles.

  ISEM-RC-073

mind-and-cognition

• We must never acknowledge exceptions or contradictions as real. The word exception is unscientific; it merely names things whose causation we do not know.

  ISEM-RC-081

• Experiments are only judgments; they necessarily require comparison between two things. The intentional element in an experiment is the comparison which the mind intends to make.

  ISEM-RC-028