milieu intérieurn.

1913 Science 14 Mar. 391/1 This active protoplasm everywhere, as well as that which surrounds it—the environment and the milieu intérieur—appear to be and to have been always of stable reaction.

1939 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 4 759/2 As one peruses the account of his researches, one is impressed by the pioneer work which he set in motion, such as studies dealing with the function of the bodily fluids, or the milieu interieur, as he termed it.

1955 Sci. Amer. May 35/1 Although the precise mode of these factors is still unknown, there is no reason to doubt that they act by changing the environment, especially the milieu intérieur, in which higher organisms and microbes have evolved to a state of biological equilibrium.

1968 Brit. Jrnl. Psychiatry 114 896/2 Physiological principles of homeostasis are constantly invoked and carefully explained at every point, so that even C. Bernard's milieu interieur becomes somewhat over-distended at the unremitting effort to accommodate the whole of psychology and psychiatry in a single theme.

1999 Sunday Tel. (Electronic ed.) 21 Mar. 5 The point, which scarcely needs elaboration, is that the human organism, thanks to the milieu interieur, is remarkably robust—as it has to be—and so is quite impervious to changes in the exterieur.