ABSTRACT
‘Experimental bodies’ are entities which can be substituted for patients’ bodies in order to investigate diseases and look for treatments. ‘Experimental bodies’ include laboratory animals and their organs and tissues, but also human tissues, cells and cell-fragments, and entire human bodies. ‘Statistical bodies’ excepted, ‘experimental bodies’ are found in specific ecological niches, the biomedical laboratories. The physiologists’ claim that laboratory studies are indispensable to the understanding of human diseases was not fully accepted until the advent of bacteriology. The new science of bacteriology relied extensively on the use of laboratory animals; the rapid spread of bacteriological research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged the use of animals to study human diseases. While bacteriologists and immunologists elaborated animal models of infectious diseases, physiologists and biochemists continued to use animals to study general biological mechanisms.
