Paul Bert


Bert, Paul

 

Born Oct. 19, 1833, in Auxerre, Yonne; died Nov. 11, 1886, in Hanoi. French naturalist and physician. Member of the Institute of France (1881). Doctor of medicine (1863) and doctor of natural sciences (1866).

Bert was a student of and successor to C. Bernard in the physiology chair of the faculty of natural sciences at the Sorbonne (1869). He was the founder of contemporary aviation and submarine medicine. His investigations in transplantation and the grafting of animal tissues were a valuable contribution to plastic surgery. In 1869, Bert published Lectures on the Comparative Physiology of Respiration. Bert’s classic work on barometric pressure (1878) remained unappreciated; only 30 years later did the English physiologist J. S. Haldane call Bert the father of the study of the influence of the barometric factor on the animal organism. Lectures on Zoology has been translated into Russian (1882; 4th ed., 1904).

WORKS

La pression barométrique. Paris, 1878.

G. E. FEL’DMAN