One polarizing figure in the anti-vivisection movement was François Magendie. Magendie was a physiologist at the Académie Royale de Médecine in France, established in the first half of the 19th century. Magendie made several groundbreaking medical discoveries, but was far more aggressive than some of his other contemporaries with his use of animal experimentation. For example, the discovery of the different functionalities of dorsal and ventral spinal nerve roots was achieved by both Magendie, as well as a Scottish anatomist named Charles Bell. Bell used an unconscious rabbit because of "the protracted cruelty of the dissection", which caused him to miss that the dorsal roots were also responsible for sensory information. Magendie, on the other hand, used conscious, six-week-old puppies for his own experiments. While Magendie's approach was more of an infringement on what we would today call animal rights, both Bell and Magendie used the same justification for vivisection: the cost of animal lives and experimentation was well worth it for the benefit of humanity.