390 A Menache dissect human cadavers (Aird 2011) Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) was also a staunch critic of Galen and concluded that Galen in his anatomical works had relied too much on animal dissections (Joutsivio 1997) An examination of the contextual role of animals in the more recent history of medicine is equally helpful in explaining the culture of animal abuse in science today A logical place to begin is the 1865 publication, ‘An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine’ by Frenchman Claude Bernard (Bernard and Greene 1957) This treatise firmly established animal experimentation as a scientific method in which the similarities between animals and people were considered by far to outweigh the differences Bernard put scientific medicine on a new foundation, namely the animal laboratory, where hypotheses could be rigorously tested Indeed, he placed laboratory study above clinical and epidemiological findings and rejected evolution and evolutionary biology in favour of creationism (Lafollette 1997) A pupil of Descartes, Bernard promoted Cartesian reductionism in the form of ‘hypothetico-deductivism’ whereby species differences are merely quantitative In other words, although a dog liver was visibly smaller than that of a human, both nevertheless, functioned in exactly the same way Considered a genius by many in his day, Bernard could be forgiven today for not knowing that there are significant physiological differences between the liver of a human and a dog In the modern era, this species difference is evidenced by the fact that drug-induced liver damage in people is the most frequent reason cited for the withdrawal from the market of an approved drug, despite extensive preclinical animal testing, and accounts for more than 50 % of acute liver failure in the USA (Lee 2003) The Legal Basis for Animal Abuse in Science The Nuremberg Code A major influence on the legal requirement that animals be used in research and testing was formalised in the Nuremberg Code, which came out of a second trial in post-war Germany in December, 1946 (Greek 2012) Most of the defendants on trial were medical doctors charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes against humanity The Nuremberg Code subsequently emerged from these proceedings, laying the groundwork for safeguarding the rights of human subjects in clinical trials During the course of the legal proceedings, the advisor to the prosecutor for US v Brandt, Dr Andrew C Ivy was responsible for authoring the manuscript the prosecutors used to