Yet we shall reach really fruitful and luminous generalizations about vital phenomena only in so far as we ourselves experiment and, in hospitals, amphitheaters, or laboratories, stir the fetid or throbbing ground of life.

If a comparison were required to express my idea of the science of life, I should say that it is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 15.