Man, The Unknown (Alexis Carrel, 1935)

alexis-carrel's popular book on the need for a science of the whole human being. T1: the primary text, read from a 169-page PDF of the Harper & Brothers edition, whose title page says "Copyright 1935, 1939" and "Containing A New Introduction." The introduction is dated New York, 15 June 1939. The PDF is a third-party scan hosted on an archive.org-wrapped copy, so page numbers below are PDF pages, not the printed book's. published: 1935 is the first-edition date from the copyright line.

It matters here because it is the source behind the one quotation that professional-deformation carried secondhand from professional-deformation-wikipedia-en (T2), which dates the book 1939. The 1939 date is the revised edition with the new introduction. The book is from 1935.

The passage, in its own words

From Chapter II, "The Science of Man" (PDF pp. 25-26), in a stretch about the need to make a full "inventory" of what is known of man, measurable or not:

"It often happens that undue importance is given to some part at the expense of the others. We are obliged to consider all the different aspects of man, physicochemical, anatomical, physiological, metapsychical, intellectual, moral, artistic, religious, economic, and social. Every specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understands the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him. Fragmentary aspects are considered as representing the whole. And these aspects are taken at random, following the fashion of the moment, which in turn gives more importance to the individual or to society, to physiological appetites or to spiritual activities, to muscular development or to brain power, to beauty or to utility, etc. Man, therefore, appears with many different visages. We arbitrarily choose among them the one that pleases us, and forget the others."

Wikipedia's quoted sentence is accurate word for word. What it drops is everything around it. Carrel is not describing an occupational trait. He is describing an error of inventory: the whole of man has many aspects, each owned by a separate science, and the fashion of the day decides which one is treated as the whole. "Professional bias" is a passing phrase in that argument ("a well-known professional bias"), used as something readers already knew. It is not offered as a named concept or coined here.

He applies it by name, twice

A few pages on (PDF p. 29) he says specialization is "imperative" and "impossible for a specialist ... to understand the human being as a whole," then gives examples. The bacteriologist Calmette, he says, prescribed his tuberculosis vaccine without thinking of housing, food or working conditions. And John Dewey, "a philosopher," designed education around "the schema, the abstraction, which his professional bias made him take for the concrete child." This is the same John Dewey whose "occupational psychosis" the English article files beside the term through Merton (professional-deformation). The coincidence is worth noting; no link between the two uses is claimed.

The thesis the passage sits inside

The book opens on "a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life." Carrel's introduction states the argument plainly: astronomy, mechanics and physics "have progressed much more rapidly than physiology, psychology, and sociology." Man "has gained the mastery of the material world before knowing himself," so "modern society has been built at random, according to the chance of scientific discoveries and to the fancy of ideologies, without regard for the laws of our body and soul." The specialist remark is one case of the same worry from the knowledge side: the sciences of life are too fragmented to give the picture of man that society needs. His remedy is a science of man "in his wholeness," and he wants it to guide the rebuilding of society.

So the quotation belongs to a time-bound 1930s argument about civilization, crisis and the lag of the human sciences. It is not a finding about specialists. Nothing in the passage is tested; it is the opinion of a surgeon-biologist, offered with confidence.

Dated and loaded material elsewhere in the book

The book is a product of its decade, and the specialist-bias passage is not a safe guide to the rest.

Eugenics is argued openly and with approval. The book says eugenics "is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong" and that "the propagation of the insane and the feeble-minded ... must be prevented" (PDF p. 156). It proposes premarital medical examination, though it doubts such examinations are reliable, and favours voluntary eugenics. It calls families with a tendency to insanity "more dangerous than gangsters and murderers." It looks for "a hereditary biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics" (PDF p. 157). It also blames women's education and "the progress of feminism" for falling birth rates among the strong. The 1939 introduction also observes that Germany and Italy "are driven by faith to sacrifice themselves for an ideal--even if that ideal is false," and blames Marx's "incomplete vision" for the Russian failure. It is a description, not an endorsement, but the book is written in the same year as the Europe it describes.
Race and heredity are treated as settled categories ("the strong," "inferior products") in a way current science does not support.
Metapsychical phenomena such as clairvoyance are asked to be inventoried alongside nerve chronaxy (PDF p. 25).

These do not change what the specialist passage says. They do mean the book cannot be cited as neutral authority on the human sciences. The 1930s eugenics and "science of man" programme is the background to that remark, not something separate from it. The book itself says "eugenics, to be useful, should be voluntary" and that it "asks for the sacrifice of many individuals" (PDF pp. 156-157). That matters for describing it fairly, and it does not make the underlying judgments about who counts as unfit any less dated.

What this source does and does not settle

It upgrades the Carrel citation on professional-deformation from a T2 rendering to the book itself.
It says nothing about who coined déformation professionnelle. The coinage conflict between pitirim-sorokin and Daniel Warnotte stays open.
It is not a study of occupational bias; there is no data in it.