THE PANCREAS 



were still lost in a chaos of undetermined facts, it 

 was impossible that men should analyse the pheno- 

 mena of life : first, because these phenomena go 

 back to the laws of chemistry and physics ; and 

 next, because they cannot be studied without the 

 apparatus, instruments, and all other methods of 

 analysis that we owe to the laboratories of the 

 chemists and the physicists." (CI. Bernard, Phys. 

 Opdr., p. 6 1.) 



Therefore de Graaf failed, because he got no 

 help from other sciences. But it cannot be called 

 failure ; he must be contrasted with the men of 

 his time, Lindanus and Bartholini, facts against 

 theories, not with men of this century. And 

 Claude Bernard went back to de Graafs method 

 of the fistula, having to guide him the facts of 

 chemistry observed by Valentin, Tiedemann and 

 Gmelin, and Eberle. His work began in 1846, and 

 the Academie des Sciences awarded a prize to it in 

 1850:— 



" Let this vague conception (the account of the 

 pancreas given in Johannes Milller's Text-book of 

 Physiology) be compared with the knowledge which 

 we at present have of the several distinct actions of 

 the pancreatic juice, and of the predominant import- 

 ance of this fluid not only in intestinal digestion but in 

 digestion as a whole, and it will be at once seen what 

 a great advance has taken place in this matter since 

 the early forties. That advance we owe in the main 

 to Bernard. Valentin, it is true, had in 1844 not only 

 inferred that the pancreatic juice had an action 

 on starch, but confirmed his view by actual experi- 

 ment with the juice expressed from the gland ; and 



