Disputed discovery: vivisection and experiment in the 19th century

In the early 19th century, physiologists Sir Charles Bell and François Magendie both claimed to have been the first to identify separate motor and sensory nerve roots, a discovery acknowledged by their contemporaries as one of the most important of the age. This priority dispute came to embody distinct visions of physiology, and of the role of experimentation and vivisection within that discipline. The dispute remained unresolved, in part, because of competing definitions of what was being discovered.