‘The early anatomists weren’t able to shed much light on the issue, as the soul wasn’t something you could see or set your scalpel to.  Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the fist anatomists settled on generative primacy: What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul.  The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first-trimester human embryos were difficult to come by.  Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo.  To quote Vivian Nutton, author of “The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine” in ‘The Human Embryo’, “Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s egges floundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.”

- From ‘Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers’ by Mary Roach.

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