“[L]ast night a nasty little dog was in the dissecting room shut up there for some experiment or other & made free with the Os Cuboides & the falanges of the little Toe, for wh. I have substituted part of an other foot,” wrote Hampton Weekes, a resident apothecary's pupil at St. Thomas's, to his father on 10 November 1801. Busy making anatomical preparations to send home, Hampton evinced complete disinterest in what that “experiment or other” might have been about, much less concern for the fate of the dog. Hampton later warned his family: “These things I suppose you will not circulate for what I tell you on this head I conceive goes no farther.” Hampton, happily participating in the clinical and anatomical rituals at St. Thomas's and Guy's, was quite blasé about the notion of animal experiments, yet clearly aware others might not have such enlightened views. Hampton, in short, even as a pupil on the fringes of hospital men's investigations, identified with the culture of “men of science.” He acquired those tidbits of theory that extended his repertoire not only into talk of constitutions and ultimate causes for disease, but also into experiments and science. He savored those delicious moments of knowing more about nature than others did: “I tell Dick ye source of animal heat is acertained ask him if he knows it,” he wrote to his sister, Mary Ann, “This is a chemical operation–.”