BERNARD, Claude. Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale.
Paris, J. B. Baillière et Fils, 1865.

In-8 (217 x 143 mm), 400 pp., (1) f.
Chocolate half-maroquin, spine ribbed, gilt author and title framed in fillet, bookbinder's name on tail of spine (A. Goupil).

The first edition of Claude Bernard's seminal work is one of the high points of nineteenth-century scientific thought.
A precious first edition copy, printed by Crété in Corbeil.

Conceived as the introduction to a larger work that remained unfinished, this volume constitutes a veritable epistemological revolution: Claude Bernard sets out clearly and rigorously the fundamental principles of experimental method applied to the life sciences. Émile Zola, who saw Bernard as ‘a master’, drew direct inspiration from it to formulate his aesthetic of naturalism, transposing the experimental rigour of the laboratory to the social and psychological observation of the novel.

‘Probably the greatest book on the principles of physiological investigation and the scientific method applied to the life sciences’, according to Garrison and Morton. The Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine ‘is for us what the Discourse on Method was for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, wrote Bergson.

A very fresh copy, free from foxing, in its perfectly preserved, signed binding - in exceptional condition.

An absolute classic of scientific literature, cited by the most important bibliographies:
Garrison & Morton, n°1766-501 ; Waller, n°400 ; Norman, n°206 ; HoH, n°974 ; Horblit, 11b ; En français dans le texte, n°288 ; PMM, n°353.