Edward Tyson

Edward Tyson (1651 to 1708) was an English scientist and physician commonly regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy. Born at Clevedon in Somerset, he took his BA at Oxford in 1670, his MA in 1673 and his MD at Cambridge in 1678, was admitted to the College of Physicians in 1680 and made a Fellow in 1683, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November 1679. In 1684 he became physician and governor of Bethlem Hospital in London, where he is credited with changing the hospital from a zoo of sorts to a place intended to assist its inmates. In 1680 he studied a porpoise and established that it is a mammal, and in 1698 he dissected a chimpanzee on display at the London docks and wrote Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, concluding that the chimpanzee has more in common with man than with monkeys, particularly in its brain. In 1683 he dissected a timber rattlesnake, produced one of the earliest and most accurate descriptions of the internal anatomy of snakes and was the first to describe the loreal pits of the Crotalinae.