SKILL AS EXPERIMENTER 41 



The Quest for Truth — As already mentioned, Bernard possessed 

 a faculty that contributed in no small degree to his success as phy- 

 siologist. Huxley has described an educated man as one whose hand 

 is the ready servant of his will. Often, too, great stress is laid upon 

 the purely intellectual qualities and too little upon that manual dex- 

 terity which is so essential to successful work in the laboratory. 

 In fact medicine itself is an art as well as an ensemble of sciences, 

 and the art is as important as the science. As much depends upon 

 the skillful use of the senses, and in surgery, skill in manipulation, 

 as upon the well trained mind. The extreme nicety with which Ber- 

 nard performed his dissections excited the astonishment as well as 

 the admiration of his associates. It was this faculty which first won 

 him the favor of Majendie. A clumsy experiment is apt to be a poor 

 experiment barren of results, and a patient's chances of life may be 

 jeopardized by an operation poorly performed. 



Bernard was active until the end. On what proved to be his death- 

 bed he worked at the revision of proofs of a volume of lectures on 

 operative physiology. He died oiL-the tenth of February, 1878, and 

 was laid in the grave with all the pomp and ceremony of a state fu- 

 neral. Gambetta eulogized him as one who had never allowed himself 

 toloe led away either by party spirit or by the dogmas of a school, or 

 by private feelings. Bernard's work is a model of patient persevering 

 investigation, experiment and research, an unprejudiced and disinter- 

 ested quest for truth. He lived up to and fulfilled the ideals with 

 which he began his career, ideals aptly expressed : "Truth like beauty 

 is when unadorned, adorned the most." Such ideals have inspired men 

 of light and leading of all time; they inspire medicine today, ideals 

 old yet always new, and we may say with Kipling : 



"The men bulk big on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail. 

 They're God's own guides on the Long Trail, the trail that's always new. ' 



