The potential of medical science to assess accurately the medical complaints of the stomach was asserted in an unprecedented manner from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Physiologists began to stress new ways of understanding the human body which claimed to be more precise than the work of pathological anatomists. This resulted from the fascination with the digestive system held amongst late nineteenth-century laboratory researchers. Of course, medical and scientific investigators had long aimed to understand fully the nature and functions of the gastric system. Yet, the retrieval of the contents of the stomach for analysis had not always proven easy. A variety of investigative methods had been attempted including those of René Réaumur who had trained a pet kite to swallow and regurgitate food-filled tubes in order to show that digestion was primarily a process of chemical dissolution rather than trituration and putrefaction. Italian physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani, meanwhile, had established the solvent powers of saliva by regurgitating linen bags. He was also in the habit of inserting putrid flesh into the stomachs of living dogs as part of an attempt to ascertain whether the powers of the organ's juices could make the flesh fresh again. Yet during the nineteenth century, investigations took on distinctively new forms than previously. Laboratory experimentation increasingly aspired to grounding understandings of illness and disease firmly in new regimes of modern science. Experimental physiology became far more intense and continuous than in earlier periods and was almost entirely pursued in institutional settings.