Marie Françoise Bernard

[1] Marie Françoise Martin married Claude Bernard on Wednesday 7 May 1845, and it was her dowry from her father, a physician, that allowed him to pursue his studies under François Magendie at the Collège de France in Paris.

Magendie, Claude Bernard and his fellow physiologists—men such as Charles Richet in France and Michael Foster in England—were strongly criticized for the vivisection they carried out on animals, particularly dogs.

Anti-vivisectionists infiltrated Magendie's lectures in Paris, where he was dissecting dogs without anaesthetic, allegedly shouting "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!"

[5] At the age of 19 Claude Bernard wrote a play called Arthur de Bretagne,[6] which was published only after his death.

[6][8] In 2016, the American author of experimental literature Thalia Field published Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction, a thoroughly-researched novel in which she writes about Claude Bernard and the nineteenth-century animal rights movement from the point of view of Marie-Françoise "Fanny" Bernard.