In the early 19th Century, Charles Bell and François Magendie engaged in a priority dispute over the discovery of the roots of motor and sensory nerves. The dispute, which lasted for most of Bell’s professional life, illuminated the ways in which medical science was changing. When Bell first wrote on the nerves in 1811, surgeon-anatomists ran small schools of anatomy in their homes, natural Theology was in vogue, exchanges between British and French medical practitioners were limited by the Napoleonic Wars, and British practitioners seemed to be rejecting the vivisection that was being adopted in France as a method for understanding the body. As was typical at the time, Bell developed both a specialist and non-specialist audience for “his discovery,” which he presented to the scientific community through lectures at his Windmill Street School of Anatomy, thereby drawing a larger number of students who would help generate income. By the end of Magendie’s career, medical science had changed. It was produced in the laboratory, a closed space belonging to expert scientists. It was taught through artfully produced and mastered performances, of the sort at which Magendie excelled, in classrooms and lecture theaters, the semi-restricted spaces of science. And finally, medical science was disseminated through journals, a space proclaimed to be open and unrestricted for purposes of priority disputes. As this priority dispute reveals, the rise of scientific experts and creation of disciplines and specialties, long recognized as hallmarks of modern science, occurred alongside, and sometimes by means of, a division of the spaces for science that had previously been united by their pedagogical purposes. Over the course of Bell’s career in London, and of his priority dispute, pedagogy lost pride of place, and the priority dispute was settled for history as much by those changing spaces of science as it was by work on the “discovery” itself.