Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery: Physiology Teaching in Early Nineteenth-Century London

As long ago as 1897, the Viennese historian Max Neuberger wrote that eighteenth-century French surgeons had reported on cranial injuries as if they were physiological experiments, and that this kind of “surgical experiment” had opened the way to topical diagnosis. Temkin, in a famous paper of 1951, proposed that this anatomical point of view was a product of the daily experience of any working surgeon. According to this model, the anatomical view came to dominate nineteenth-century French medicine through the dominance of surgeons in hospital teaching.