Compare: "James is one of my typical subjects. Every Wednesday, he would visit me in my lab at 2pm, and, grimacing, swallow down two yellow pills from his bottle, while I watched. At the end of the study, I watched James and the other students file into the classroom, sit down, and fill out the surveys on each desk; as they left, I gave each of them a check for $50."

I'm under the impression that old scientific papers were more like this. See e.g. Millikan (1926) on cosmic rays:

We chose for the first experiments Muir Lake (11,800 feet high), just under the brow of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the United States, a beautiful snow-fed lake hundreds of feet deep and some 2000 feet in diameter. Here we worked for the last ten days in August, sinking our electroscopes to various depths down to 67 feet. Our experiments brought to light altogether unambiguously a radiation of such extraordinary pene- trating power that the electroscope-readings kept decreasing down to a depth of 50 feet below the surface. The atmosphere above the lake was equivalent in absorbing power to 23 feet of water, so that here were rays so penetrating that, if they came from outside the atmosphere, they had the power of pass- ing through 50 + 23 = 73 feet of water, or the equivalent of 6 feet of lead, before being completely absorbed. The most penetrating X-rays that we produce in our hospitals cannot go through half an inch of lead. Here were rays at least a hundred times more penetrating than these, and having an absorption coefficient but one twenty-fifth, instead of "about one-tenth of that of the hardest known gamma rays."8

(Emphasis as in the original.)