[Curare and Claude Bernard--how was his work introduced into Japanese scientific communities?].

"Curare and Claude BERNARD" is a well known set of physiology in several western scientific and medical communities. In using arrow poison curare as a tool of physiological anatomical approach, Bernard founded the experimental physiology of the nervous system. His famous experiments of using curare on frogs led to the observation of curare block in the myoneural junction of skeletal muscle. Bernard's achievements in curare research are recorded in full detail in his principal book of lectures, "Leçons sur les effets des substances toxiques et medicamenteuses (1857)". Nevertheless, Japanese physiological communities, attaching too much importance to German physiology between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, have mostly neglected the important work on curare done by Bernard, and the after-effect of this neglect is on-going in Japan. The aim of this article is to try to enlighten the communities with a small part of his lectures (i.e., arrow poison curare) described in "Leçons (1857)", which never reached us.