By 1850 laboratories were transforming physiology and pathology and making their mark too upon medical education. Laboratories were far from new – they were an innovation of the age of Boyle and Hooke; nor, for that matter, was experimental medicine. Nevertheless nineteenth-century practitioners of organic chemistry, microscopy, physiology and other medicine-related disciplines were right to believe they were in at the birth of a new enterprise: while the hospital, they conceded, was fine for making observations, the laboratory was the place for systematic controlled experimentation.
Blood and Guts, by Roy Porter