The English physiologist William Harvey was the first European to accurately describe how blood circulated, thanks to dissecting live animals. (Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician from Damascus, beat him by a long shot, accurately describing pulmonary circulation three hundred years prior.) Claude Bernard, the renowned French physiologist, supposedly live-dissected his family dog in the 1860s. The story goes that after coming home to find what Bernard had done, his wife and daughters left him to join an early anti-vivisection society. Vivisection fell out of fashion not because science had changed
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