34 THE BIOLOGICAL PROBLEM 



elements are dealt with, so that the events studied have a 

 chance of repeating themselves. But this would not be 

 possible, as Henri Poincare pointed out, if instead of ninety- 

 two simple elements we had ninety-two billions of them, 

 equally distributed in the world. 



'Then each time we picked up a new pebble, there would 

 be a great probability of its being made of an unknown 

 substance. Everything known about other pebbles would 

 be of no help for this one. In front of each new object we 

 would be like a new-born child. In such a world there 

 would be no science. Thought and even life would perhaps 

 be impossible, for evolution could not have developed the 

 instinct of conservation.'^ 



The medical man, on the contrary, even though he tries, 

 like the chemist and the biologist, to simplify, to unify, and 

 to generalize with respect to the cells, the body fluids, and the 

 organs, is not the doctor of living beings in general. He is 

 not even the doctor of the human race, but of the human 

 individual:, and what is more, of an individual in certain 

 morbid conditions which are special and which constitute 

 what has been called his idiosyncrasy. From which it seems 

 that medicine, contrary to the other sciences, must constitute 

 itself by being more and more individualized. (Claude Bernard.) 



It is needless to point out that this contradiction is purely 

 artificial and due to the fact that the groundwork, on which 

 the physiologist and, later on, the medical man must rest, is 

 still too frail and too scarce, owing precisely to our ignorance 

 concerning the structure of the chemical elements of the 

 organism. It is therefore necessary first of all to enrich bio- 

 chemistry and bio-physics with facts, so as to supply physio- 

 logists with the foundations which are actually wanting. 



But this programme, which holds in so few words, gives 

 rise to extreme difficulties not suspected in the time of Claude 

 Bernard. 



^ Henri Poincare, Science et Methode. 



