ABSTRACT
Anatomy, to the modern way of thinking, is not a particularly experimental discipline, that is to say a discipline to which the use of experiment to create new knowledge about the functioning of humans and other animals is absolutely central. I suspect that most of us would offer that palm to different modern disciplines that study the phenomena of animal life, in particular to experimental physiology, rather than to anatomy. Yet anatomy had always been a discipline built around experiment, and until the end of the long eighteenth century anatomists in their dozens resorted to experiment with great keenness. To see some of the ways in which anatomy was a fundamentally experimental discipline, I propose looking at a few specimen experiments conducted by different anatomists in the period.
