Claude Bernard

French physician and physiologist, a medical researcher who used animals in his studies. Bernard is attributed with noted discoveries in the functions of the pancreas and liver. His work on the autonomic nervous system led to understanding how an organism's system maintains a state of balance. Bernard proposed the concept that became known as homeostasis. His advances in his field saved lives then and in the future.

British physician Anna Kingsford, who became an impassioned anti-vivisectionist and a spiritualist, claims to have killed him along with Paul Bert with her "spiritual thunderbolts for torturing and baking animals to death."

Bernard died on 10 February 1878, Paris.