BERARD, JOSEPH FREDERIC French physician and philosopher, was born at Montpellier. His Doc trine medicale de l'ecole de Montpellier (1819) is indispensable to a proper understanding of the principles of the Vitalistic school. From 1823 to 1826 he was professor of medicine at Paris; he was then nominated professor of hygiene at Montpellier. His most important book is his Doctrines des rapports du physique et du moral (1823). Berard held that self-consciousness reveals to us the existence of an immaterial, thinking, feeling and willing subject, the self or soul. Alongside of this there is the vital force, the nutritive power, which uses the physical frame as its organ.