Priority and Controversy in 19th-Century Anatomy

What is it about?

This article is about the ways in which apparently simple priority disputes evolve over time, and uses the twenty-year priority dispute between Charles Bell and Francois Magendie over the discovery of the roots of the nerves as exemplary. Priority disputes are not static clashes between two sides over a discrete discovery; instead, the disputed itself changes shape over time, and the key actors reposition themselves and their work rhetorically in response to each other.

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Why is it important?

Historians have rarely examined the temporality of priority disputes or the ways in which the content of "the discovery" changes over time with the repositioning of actors involved in the dispute. They have tended to flatten such disputes into two discrete positions. This article reveals the ways in which such flattening masks the fluid, shape-shifting nature of such disputes and of discovery itself.