He most likely adopted it from the histologist Charles Robin, who had employed the phrase "milieu de l’intérieur" as a synonym for the ancient hippocratic idea of humors.
[3] He summed up his idea as follows: The fixity of the milieu supposes a perfection of the organism such that the external variations are at each instant compensated for and equilibrated.... All of the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have always one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of life in the internal environment....
While Rudolf Virchow placed the focus on the cell, others, such as Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878) continued to study humoral pathology particularly the matter of microcirculation.
Hans Eppinger (1879–1946), a professor of internal medicine in Vienna, further developed von Rokitansky's point of view and showed that every cell requires a suitable environment which he called the ground substance for successful microcirculation.
[5] Bernard created his concept to replace the ancient idea of life forces with that of a mechanistic process in which the body's physiology was regulated through multiple mechanical equilibrium adjustment feedbacks.
This happened in spite of Bernard being highly honored as the founder of modern physiology (he indeed received the first French state funeral for a scientist).
[8] Initial work was conducted by Albert Szent-Györgyi who concluded that organic communication could not be explained solely by the random collisions of molecules and studied energy fields as well as the connective tissue.
This was further explored and advanced by Szent-Györgyi in 1941 in a Koranyi Memorical Lecture in Budapest, published in both Science and Nature, wherein he proposed that proteins are semi-conductors and capable of rapid transfer of free electrons within an organism.
This is a structured water that provides stability for metabolic functioning, and related to collagen as well, the major protein in the extracellular matrix[13] and in DNA.
[5] In 1953 a German doctor and scientist, Reinhold Voll, discovered that points used in acupuncture had different electrical properties from the surrounding skin, namely a lower resistance.
The former is "a transparent, half-fluid gel produced and sustained by the fibroblast cells of the connective tissues" consisting of highly polymerized sugar-protein complexes.
The ground substance, according to German research, determines what enters and exits the cell and maintains homeostasis, which requires a rapid communication system to respond to complex signals (see also Bruce Lipton).
Through these tunnels, shaped like the hole through a donut, large chemicals may traverse from capillaries through the ground substance and into the functional cells of organs and back again.
[clarification needed] Structural continuity between extracellular, cyst skeletal and nuclear components was discussed by Hay,[18] Berezny et al.[19] and Oschman.
[20] Historically, these elements have been referred to as ground substances, and because of their continuity, they act to form a complex, interlaced system that reaches into and contacts every part of the body.