Comparative anatomy
Edward Tyson is regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy. He is credited with determining that whales and dolphins are, in fact, mammals. Also, he concluded that chimpanzees are more similar to humans than to monkeys because of their arms. Marco Aurelio Severino also compared various animals, including birds, in his "Zootomia democritaea", one of the first works of comparative anatomy. In the 18th and 19th century, great anatomists like George Cuvier, Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley revolutionized our understanding of the basic build and systematics of vertebrates, laying the foundation for Charles Darwin's work on evolution. An example of a 20th-century comparative anatomist is Victor Negus, who worked on the structure and evolution of the larynx. Until the advent of genetic techniques like DNA sequencing, comparative anatomy together with embryology were the primary tools for understanding phylogeny, as exemplified by the work of Alfred Romer.
Antonio Benivieni
Antonio Benivieni (1443–1502) was a Florentine physician who pioneered the use of the autopsy, a postmortem dissection of a deceased patient's body used to understand the cause of death. Benivieni published a treatise entitled "De Abditis Morborum Causis" ("The Hidden Causes of Disease") which is now considered one of the first works in the science of pathology. Some of the protocols developed by Benivieni are similar to those used in autopsies to this day, and he has been referred to as the "father of pathologic anatomy."