 Shanks has explored the role played by animal experimentation in the contexts of anatomy and physiology during the renaissance.He has argued that animal experimentation provided a crucial driving force behind the method of analysis and synthesis that would come to play a central role in the emergence of the physico-chemical sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries.According to Shanks, the development of modern science flows from "physik" (i.e., medicine) to "physics", and not the reverse as is commonly supposed.