Cross-cultural communication （68）　

68) Thoughts on Claude Bernard
The story takes us back more than 50 years to the early 1970s. It was a few years after I had enrolled at Osaka Medical College. At that time, I had started studying French as well as English. I had only just started learning French, and my grammar and vocabulary were still at a very basic level. However, since I had started studying French as a medical student, I wanted to try reading some French-language materials related to medicine.

At the time, I heard that Dr. K, who taught psychology in the liberal arts program, was also a psychiatrist and was fluent in German and French. Therefore, one day, I visited Dr. K's office and, having just started learning French, I asked him to introduce me to some French-language medical books. Without hesitation, he took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. “Kido-kun, the basis of medicine is physiology, after all. When it comes to physiology, it's Claude Bernard. You should work hard and read this.” It was Introduction to Experimental Medicine by Claude Bernard.

That night, I took the Introduction to Experimental Medicine that Dr. K had lent me home and managed to type the foreword on my Olivetti typewriter, which I had bought when I entered medical school. However, at the time, my French language ability was not good enough to understand the content. So, a few days later, I went to Kinokuniya bookstore in Umeda and bought the Japanese translation from the Iwanami Bunko series, and managed to finish reading it in a week, relying on the translation. I thought that Bernard was a genius for writing down principles that are still valid in modern experimental medicine in the 19th century. However, there was one more thing that moved me after reading the book to the end. On the last page of the book I had borrowed, there was a note in the margin that said “Read November 1945”. Of course, I think it must have been written by Professor K, but at that time, in the confusion immediately after the defeat of the Pacific War, Professor K had read “Introduction to Experimental Medicine” in the French version.

This was the start of a gradual friendship with Professor K. He also had an outpatient clinic for psychiatry, and even after I went on to study at the medical school, I would sometimes see him at the university hospital. One day, I bumped into him in the hospital elevator. The first thing he said was, “Hey Kido-kun, what a coincidence. I want to get off on the 5th floor, so could you do something about that?” At the time, the elevators were basically the same as they are now, and all you had to do was press the 5th floor button. When he arrived safely on the 5th floor, he said “Thank you” from the bottom of his heart. I think that Dr. K probably had symptoms similar to those of Asperger's syndrome. He was outstandingly skilled in his specialist fields of psychiatry and psychology, but he was unable to do things that anyone could do in their daily lives, such as operating an elevator. Also, as he himself said, he was able to read and write French and German with ease, but when it came to speaking, he was completely useless. One time, he went to listen to a lecture by a German psychiatrist who had come to Japan, and at the reception after the lecture, he asked a question about adolescent psychiatry. He said that when he pronounced the German word for adolescence, 'pubertat', as 'pyubeerteit', he couldn't get his point across at all. It was only then that he realized that Germans pronounce it as 'pubertate', a little like the English way of saying it. I admired Dr. K none-the-less, and I respected him completely and literally.

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