How was Claude Bernard's theory of health different from Louis Pasteur's?

Conventional medicine has been obsessed with killing the infective organism rather than promoting defense against infection. This obsession really began with Louis Pasteur, the nineteenth-century physician and researcher who played a major role in the development of germ theory. This theory holds that different diseases are caused by different infectious organisms.

Much of Pasteur's life was dedicated to finding substances that would kill the infecting organisms. Pasteur and later figures who pioneered effective treatments for infectious diseases have given us a great deal for which we all should be thankful. However, there is more to the situation than the virility of the organism.

Another nineteenth-century French scientist, Claude Bernard, also made major contributions to medical understanding. But Bernard had a different view of health and disease. He believed that a person's internal environment was more important in determining disease than any infective organism or pathogen.

In other words, he believed that the internal terrain or the host's susceptibility to infection was more important than the germ. Physicians, he believed, should focus more on making this internal terrain a very inhospitable place for disease. Bernard's theory led to some rather interesting studies.

In fact, a firm advocate of germ theory would consider some of these studies absolutely crazy. One of the most interesting was conducted by a Russian scientist, Elie Metchnikoff, the discoverer of the white blood cells. He and his research associates consumed cultures containing millions of cholera bacteria.

Yet none of them developed cholera. The reason: their immune systems were not compromised. Metchnikoff believed, like Bernard, that the correct way to deal with infectious disease was to focus on enhancing the body's own defenses.

Late in their lives, Pasteur and Bernard engaged in scientific discussions on the virtues of the germ theory and Bernard's perspective on the internal terrain. Supposedly, on h "Bernard was right. The pathogen is nothing.

The terrain is everything." Whether this is actually true or not, the point is that modern medicine has largely forgotten the importance of the "terrain.

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