This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s biological work from his immediate successors to Roman intellectuals in the late Republic and early Empire. The Peripatetics, notably Theophrastus and Eudemus, endorsed many hallmarks of Aristotelian biology (e.g. classification by differentiae in Theophrastus’ Researches into Plants), and their works on animals focused mainly on areas that were relatively underexplored by Aristotle, such as animal behavior and “character.” Readers and users of Aristotle’s biological works outside philosophical circles were mainly interested in the wealth of facts collected in the Historia Animalium especially, and much less in Aristotle’s causal investigations. The main product of this scholarly engagement with Aristotle’s biology was the Epitome by Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian at Alexandria around 200 BCE: it does aim to collect facts arranged by individual animals, but it also shows an interest in the main problems raised in GA. In Rome, Lucretius and Cicero were able to draw on Aristotelian biology to bolster arguments for Epicurean materialism and Stoic providentialism respectively. Finally, it is noteworthy that the now-lost Dissections played an important role in the early reception of Aristotle’s biology, at least until Apuleius in the second century CE.

In this sixth chapter we explore missed disputes. A typical missed dispute arose because of delayed, missing or withheld information about the extent of the harvesting of human material and its long retention period that relatives of each dead person expected to be kept informed about, but were not. Instead, pathologists involved in checking on causes of death for coroners often took the opportunity to harvest brains to do further research. Although families knew that some human material had been retained for legal purposes to secure a court conviction in cases of dangerous driving, homicide and manslaughter charges, not everything about the extent of human harvesting was disclosed. Part I thus sets in context the liminal space of medical death, and how biotechnology made calling the time of death much more complex in the modern era. This discovery reflected the rise of neuroscience and its brain banking activities that became the new frontier of modern medical science. Part II then investigates the controversial case of the Isaacs family, which created a national outcry in 2000 after it was found that Mr Isaacs brain had been retained with 23,900 other brain material deposits for ten years or more without fully informed consent.