The Life Sciences, Torture, Intuition and Imagination.

This essay seeks to provide new, tentative answers to the arbitrary legalization of torture as scientific method in the nineteenth-century. It focuses on the life and work of the French playwright and scientist Claude Bernard, who is also widely recognized as a co-founder of modern medicine.
Bernard rejected scientific experimentation because it was "torture," in his own word, and it was moreover avoidable, accroding to him, since scientists have access to soft, self-sufficient means of accessing knowledge such as intuition, imagination and dreams. As a physiologist, Bernard nevertheless carried out experiments on both human and other-than-human living beings. Why?
In her nonfiction, Hélène Sicard investigates the psychosocial factors which might explain Bernard's simultaneous disavowal and promotion of the experimental method, as well as his understanding of it as a form of creative writing, revealing that he was well aware that scientific experimentation might be one of the greatest deceptions in the history of modern medicine.