Claude Bernard, statistics and comparative trials

Claude Bernard’s (1813–1878) Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale is commonly misinterpreted as criticising the use of statistics in medicine and the quantified research practice that would later lead to clinical epidemiology. There are indeed statements in the Introduction that apparently lend support to such interpretation. For example, we can read that: ‘In a word, if based on statistics, medicine can never be anything but a conjectural science’ (Bernard, p. 197, Bernard, p. 139). But these statements are qualified by others demonstrating that Bernard advocated the use of statistics to assess the efficacy of medical treatments. For example, Bernard wrote: