The Life Sciences, Torture, Intuition and Imagination.

Focused on the life and work of one of the co-founders-if not the founder-of modern experimental medicine, namely nineteenth-century French physiologist and playwright Claude Bernard, this essay gives its readers reasonable ground to consider the institutionalization of the experimental method as sole method of scientific inquiry in the life sciences as being perhaps one of the greatest deceptions in the history of modern medicine.

As a matter of fact, the author’s non-selective reading of Bernard’s scientific writings reveals that the latter dismissed scientific experimentation on the living, which he called “vivisection,” because it was “torture”-in his own word. Besides, “vivisection” could easily be avoided, since human beings can rely on soft, self-sufficient means of accessing knowledge such as intuition, imagination and dreams, according to him. Surprisingly however, Bernard carried out experiments on both human animals and other-than-human ones, even though he was never able to find a cure with their help. Why?

In her nonfiction, Hélène Sicard seeks to provide new, tentative answers to this enigma by exploring the psychosocial factors that might explain Bernard’s simultaneous disavowal and promotion of the experimental method, as well as his idiosyncratic understanding of it as a form of creative writing-while attempting to understand why violence, and specifically torture, persists in most areas of human activity in today’s society.