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Title: The Pros and Cons of Vivisection
Author: Charles Richet
Commentator: W. D. Halliburton
Release Date: August 22, 2011 [EBook #37158]
Language: English
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THE PROS AND CONS OF VIVISECTION
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: "LA MORT."
_By Bartholomé in Père Lachaise, Paris._
_Frontispiece._]
THE PROS AND CONS OF VIVISECTION
BY
DR CHARLES RICHET
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE
PARIS
WITH A PREFACE BY
W. D. HALLIBURTON, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
1908
PREFACE
To scientific readers, Professor Charles Richet needs no introduction, but
to the public at large it may be necessary to mention that he is one of the
best known of French physiologists. He has occupied for a good many years
the Chair of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and he has
contributed greatly to the progress of the science to which he has devoted
his life; some of his discoveries are alluded to with all modesty in the
pages which follow. He is, moreover, a man of great erudition, and has been
wisely selected to be the editor of a monumental work, _Le dictionnaire de
physiologie_, which is issuing from the press to-day.
Professor Richet has given particular attention to the study of the
psychological side of physiology, and his views on pain will be read as
coming from one who is specially fitted to deal with this and other mental
phenomena.
I therefore consider it a great honour that Professor Richet should have
asked me to write a preface to his most interesting and convincing book on
the Pros and Cons of Vivisection, and it is a great pleasure to me to
commend its thoughtful perusal to all who are interested in the subject.
Professor Richet is not only one who speaks with authority, but he is one
of the gentlest and kindliest of men. The science which he teaches is the
science of life. To understand the meaning of vital processes it is
necessary to study the living organism, and to obtain this knowledge it is
sometimes necessary to perform experiments on living animals. When he
defends a practice which many regard as cruel, detestable, and immoral,
mainly because of the unscrupulous misrepresentations put forward by the
professional Anti-vivisectionists, he does so because he is convinced that
none of the epithets just mentioned correctly describe the experiments
which are carried out in physiological laboratories at the present time.
These experiments are undertaken only by properly qualified persons having
a due sense of their responsibilities. Every regard is paid to the comfort
of the animals employed; and the ultimate aim of this work is the progress
of knowledge, and the consequent relief to suffering which is so often only
the result of ignorance. The benefits which accrue are felt not only by
human beings, but also (as in veterinary practice) by the animals
themselves. No attempt is made here to defend experiments which have not
these objects in view, or which (as has happened in the past) pay no
consideration to the pain an animal experiences.
I feel quite sure that if the British public were convinced that the
experiments in our laboratories were all conducted in accordance with our
present law, the Anti-vivisection crusade would flicker out. It is the
object of those who are active propagandists on the other side to keep
their agitation going, by omitting to mention the painlessness of the
operations performed, or by suggesting (either directly or by innuendo)
that anæsthesia is a sham. My own experience, which is a wide one, has been
that physiologists not only obey the law literally, but are most
punctilious in its due observance. A certain number of trivial
irregularities have been reported to the Home Office by the inspectors
appointed under the Vivisection Act, but there has been no case of omitting
the use of anæsthetics. The majority of these offences have been for using
anæsthetics unnecessarily. A certificate in certain cases is granted for
the omission of an anæsthetic: this is given when the operation is a
trifling one, and has never been granted for any operation more serious
than the prick of a hypodermic needle. Nevertheless, the operator has
sometimes employed an anæsthetic even for this, and has in consequence been
reported to the Home Office for infringing the terms of his certificate.
Pawloff has truly said that the ideal experiment is one performed without
anæsthesia and without pain. In many cases this ideal can be realised, but
in other cases it is unattainable. Physiologists have, therefore, had to
select which of the two disturbing factors shall be absent, and they have
unhesitatingly chosen the latter. Pain must be absent (1) on grounds of
humanity, (2) because it is a far greater disturber of the normal functions
than anæsthesia is, and (3) because the struggles of an animal in pain will
nullify the accuracy of the experiment, and endanger the safety of the
delicate apparatus which it may be necessary to employ.
Exactly the same arguments apply to the employment of the antiseptic or
aseptic methods of surgery, in experiments in which the animal is kept
alive after an operation to study its effects. The healing process is then
painless, and there is absence of those febrile and inflammatory conditions
which would otherwise complicate the issue.
It is therefore for two reasons that an experimenter uses both anæsthetics
and antiseptics, (1) to save the animal suffering, and (2) to ensure the
success of the experiment.
The barbarities which are recorded by Anti-vivisectionist agitators do not
exist; the repetition of their stories in spite of repeated contradictions
is partly due to wilful misrepresentation and exaggeration, and partly the
result of ignorance of the meaning of the technical terms employed by
physiological writers.
At the Royal Commission which is now considering the question of
Vivisection, the cases of alleged cruelty have been one by one sifted to
the bottom, and in no single case has a charge of cruelty been sustained.
Any one who cares to wade through the four bluebooks of evidence which have
been printed will discover for himself that this is so. In fact, one
prominent Anti-vivisection journal (the _Verulam Review_, April-June 1907,
p. 186), in reference to the evidence given by one of the witnesses before
the Commission, had to confess, "Almost every one of Mrs Cook's horrifying
cases seems, when examined, to melt away."
An Anti-vivisectionist publication which has obtained some notoriety ("The
Shambles of Science") figured in a recent lawsuit. When the particular
charge which was the subject of the action was investigated by a prolonged
inquiry before the Lord Chief-Justice, a British jury showed their sense of
the enormity of the slander by awarding the physiologist impugned the very
substantial damages of £2000. An undertaking was subsequently given by the
publisher of this "hysterical work" (to quote the words of the Lord
Chief-Justice) that it should be withdrawn from publication. Yet the book
has been since re-issued by the authors, with the chapter that formed the
subject of the trial omitted, but otherwise with very little alteration.
The libellous statements scattered through its other chapters can still be
read by the lovers of sensation, and the authors doubtless hope that their
readers will never take the trouble to read also the evidence before the
Royal Commission in which all the allegations of cruelty have been shown to
be groundless.
The subject of curare, another bugbear of the Anti-vivisection lecturer, is
so adequately dealt with by Professor Richet that I will spare the reader
any further discussion on that question here. I have taken the liberty of
adding, in a footnote on p. 36, a statement in respect to the usages of
English physiologists in relation to that drug.
The experiments of the pharmacologist in the investigation of the action of
drugs can be and are carried out under anæsthesia in the same way as those
of the physiologist. But the experiments of the pathologist, which consist
in conveying germs and other disease products to animals, come under a
different heading. One does not deny that if the animal takes the disease,
suffering is produced. This is fully admitted by Professor Richet, and I
think that any common-sense reader will be convinced by the arguments put
forward that the practice is fully justifiable. It is difficult, as
Professor Richet points out, to gauge the amount of pain an animal such as
a rat, guinea-pig, or rabbit (the animals usually employed for the purpose)
really feels when given a disease experimentally, and whether this is
greater or less than the suffering it will endure when another disease or a
violent death carries it off in the usual course of nature. It is, however,
undeniable that the suffering of these animals is much less than those of
human beings. A man, when he is ill, suffers a certain amount of discomfort
and physical bodily pain; but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the
mental worry and anxiety he endures--all that, at any rate, is absent from
the suffering rabbit. The pathologist sees beyond the pain which he
inflicts to the pain which he prevents. The death of a few lower animals
may be, and has in the past been the means of preventing pain and disease
both to the animals themselves and to human beings also, who may be counted
by thousands or even millions.
If there is one piece of evidence more than another which was given before
the Royal Commission that deserves rescue from the oblivion of a bluebook,
it is that given by Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton. His is one of the
keenest legal intellects of modern times, and he at any rate cannot be
accused of having any axe of his own to grind. I regret that exigencies of
space prevent me from making more than one or two references to it.
He begins by taking the case of a ship infected with plague, and infested
also with rats, the carriers of plague. The ship enters port. Would it be
preferable to kill the rats, and so prevent them and the disease from
entering the port and causing untold disaster there, or staying one's hand
because the slaughter of the rats would be a painful proceeding? The
captain who gives orders for the destruction of the rats inflicts pain and
death on them in order to prevent greater pain and more widespread death
elsewhere. The captain who says, "Spare the rats," is guilty of the
criminal act of causing the death of many innocent human beings. So it is
with the Anti-vivisectionists: they see only the pain inflicted, and do not
heed the pain prevented. On this score they are in a sense logical when
they call Lord Lister a brute, although he of all men living at the present
time has been the means of preventing the greatest amount of suffering.
They see only the pain which he deliberately inflicted on a few rats and
rabbits; they cannot see, or refuse to see the measureless amount of misery
he has prevented.
In another place the Lord Justice points out that the pain inflicted in all
the laboratories of the country put together during a year is infinitesimal
compared to that which is inflicted every day in the slaughter of animals
for food; to that which ignorant farm labourers inflict without
anæsthetics, in spaying animals by thousands in order that beef and mutton
may be tenderer or have a more pleasant flavour to the consumer; to that
inflicted by sportsmen when their victims, imperfectly shot, die a
lingering death; to that which women thoughtlessly allow in order that they
may have ospreys in their hats and furs upon their backs.
So far as the satisfaction of appetite, the pandering to the so-called
sportsman's instincts, or the gratification of vanity are concerned, these
things may go on. The average Anti-vivisectionist disregards them, or at
least makes no effort to prevent them. The only kind of pain which stirs
his feelings, and meets with his opprobrium, and enables him to indulge in
his favourite epithets, is _the one justifiable bit of pain in the whole
world_--a pain inflicted with the noblest of all objects, and by the most
humane of all men (for so the medical profession admittedly is), the
object, namely, of preventing future pain, which otherwise would encompass
the world of life.
Professor Richet has wisely not made his book too long. He has been content
to select a few typical and striking examples of the benefits which
experimentation on animals has conferred upon humanity, instead of
attempting even to enumerate them all. He might for instance have dwelt
upon the extinction of rinderpest in South Africa: here, at the expense of
a few experimental animals, Koch has prevented a scourge which formerly
exterminated hundreds of thousands of cattle annually, and might still be
exercising this fell influence on to all eternity if the opponents of
scientific knowledge had their way. He might have taken the case of snake
bite, and the discovery made by his great fellow-countryman Calmette of the
means of combating this deadly poison, which has hitherto killed our Indian
fellow-subjects by its tens of thousands a year.
On coming to one of the most recent of beneficent discoveries, he might
have dwelt upon the case of Mediterranean fever, and the way which it has
been practically stamped out at Malta and Gibraltar, because the method of
its spread has been discovered and the disease prevented at the expense of
a few goats and other animals.
But those who are wilfully deaf to such arguments will not, I fear, be
convinced, even if examples are multiplied indefinitely. In spite of the
love for animals which our opponents profess, the life of cattle,
particularly if they are so far away as South Africa, does not appeal to
them. The happiness of the teeming millions of India does not come home to
them. Even the comfort of our brave soldiers and sailors in the
Mediterranean stations is of little account: they have never visited the
hospitals at Malta or Gibraltar, and seen, as they could have seen a year
or two ago, the poor fellows dying off like flies from a mysterious disease
that nothing could be done for, because the manner in which the fatal germ
entered their bodies was unknown. Now, by the simple prohibition of the use
of goat's milk, a prohibition due to animal experimentation and to that
alone, the disease has been exterminated.
Anti-vivisectionists do not come in contact with disease all day and every
day as medical men do; they therefore do not realise how widespread it is,
and what terrible forms it may take. Their notions are vague; they talk
about suffering without any intimate knowledge of the question. They bestow
their sympathies upon the few victims of the vivisector's knife or syringe;
they have none left for the larger number of victims which would have
suffered if the few had not been sacrificed. Can it be wondered at that
medical men, whose experience is so different to theirs, feel otherwise?
The doctor's life is not one in which these are just a few painful partings
with dear ones, but he is steeped in such experiences from morning till
night. His sympathies aim at the relief and cure of all this evil; and the
death of a few guinea-pigs or rabbits is a necessary incident which he has
the courage to permit because of the greater good that is the ultimate
result.
There are, however, some of the examples which ought to stir better
feelings even in the Anti-vivisectionist camp, namely, cases of diseases
which are common or used to be common in our very midst, and which we need
not go to India or Malta to look for. One of these is diphtheria, and the
statements and statistics in relation to the almost miraculous change which
has come over our ideas on this affection are incontrovertible, and are
fully set forth in the following pages. The disease no longer inspires the
terror it used to do, for it is one which can be cured, and easily cured,
by the method of serum therapy. It has not, it is true, been stamped out,
for up till the present success has not attended efforts of prevention.
Prevention is better than cure, but cure is better than suffering and
death. Just now, medical science can cure the disease, and if medical
progress continues at its present rapid rate of growth, who can doubt that
in the near future this disease, like typhus and typhoid, will be stamped
out?
Typhoid fever is an example of a disease which has only died out in this
country quite recently. When I was a student the hospital wards were full
of it; but to-day most medical students in London pass through their entire
curriculum of five years or more without ever seeing a case. What has been
accomplished for London can also be carried out in other large cities, and
the extinction of the disease is entirely due to improved sanitary
measures, and the destruction of the bacillus which causes the malady. We
often quite legitimately complain of the extravagances of our Government
departments and our County Councils, and of their apathy in questions
affecting the health of the country. We are still awaiting, for instance,
proper legislative measures to ensure the purity of milk. But this at least
we can thank them for--proper methods of disinfection and a purer
water-supply have led to the almost complete extinction of what was a
common and painful and fatal disease. But how does Vivisection come in
here? County councillors are not Vivisectors. No, they are not, but their
action is the undoubted result of public opinion; and that healthy public
opinion is the outcome of medical opinion, which was preached to deaf ears
for many years, and at last succeeded in impressing itself upon the public
at large; and this medical knowledge was the offspring of the only certain
guide in such matters, pathological experiment. It was not until the germ
of typhoid fever was recognised and isolated, not until the conditions of
its growth and the means of its destruction were experimentally verified
upon the lower animals, that any sound knowledge was obtained. Bacteriology
is at the bottom of hygiene; it is by hygienic precautions that certain
diseases are prevented; and the basis of bacteriology is experiment on
animals.
I will allow myself only one more point, and that relates to the general
question of serum therapy. Some people object to the whole conception of
serum treatment, on the ground that serum and allied substances are 'messy'
things. It was by this very expressive phrase that Lord Justice Fletcher
Moulton summarised and paraphrased the Anti-vivisectionist attitude on the
serum method of treatment. Miss Lind af Hageby on one occasion
characterised it as 'medieval,' a word which is quite meaningless in this
connection, but prettier, I admit, than "Behring's filth product," which is
the elegant name coined for antidiphtheritic serum by one of her friends.
Filth or dirt has been well defined as matter in the wrong place. Blood on
a carpet, for example, is certainly messy and dirty; it ought not to be
there. But blood or serum (the fluid part of the blood) in the heart, or in
the arteries and veins, is in its rightful place, and it does its duty of
nutrition and so forth when it comes into more immediate contact with the
tissues in the small tubes we call the capillaries. One of these duties is
to exert a protective influence upon the whole body, by destroying the
germs of disease which get in, despite all precautions. We are all of us
exposed, so long as spitting in public places is not prohibited, to the
germs of consumption, but we do not all die of that disease. This is
because the white corpuscles of our blood are in good trim, and able
successfully to devour the bacteria that enter our interior. It is those
people who are run down, and in whom the white corpuscles are 'below par,'
that catch the disease. In assisting the white corpuscles to perform this
important function, the co-operation of certain substances dissolved in the
fluid portion of the blood is also necessary. The most recently discovered
of these auxiliary substances are called _opsonins_. The word opsonin is
derived from a Greek root which means "to prepare the feast." The opsonin
either adds something to the bacterium which makes it tasty to the white
corpuscle, or removes (or neutralises) something which previously made it
distasteful. White corpuscles will not as a rule ingest and devour bacteria
from a pure culture, but they do so eagerly immediately the bacteria are
bathed in serum; and the serum which is most efficacious in acting as a
sort of sauce is that which has been obtained from an animal which has been
previously infected with the same kind of bacteria, and which has recovered
from the ailment such bacteria have set up.
This is not mere fancy: the whole sequence of events can be easily followed
on a glass slide kept at body temperature and examined with a microscope.
It is well known that if the yeast plant (which is very similar in many
details to bacteria) is grown in a solution of sugar, the sugar is broken
up and disappears, and two new substances formed from the sugar take its
place. These are alcohol and carbonic acid gas. If bacteria grow in the
blood, they do not produce alcohol, but they do produce other poisons in a
way analogous to that by which yeast produces alcohol. These poisons are
called _toxins_. There are substances in the fluid part of the blood which
are called antitoxins, because they neutralise the toxins produced by the
bacteria. Their presence constitutes a means of defence against the harmful
effects the toxins would otherwise produce. The marvellous part of the
defence is that, although we all have a certain amount of antitoxin in our
blood, the amount increases in proportion to the amount of toxin. It is a
familiar fact that rough manual labour increases the hardness of the hands;
friction stimulates the epidermis or outer skin, so that it grows in
thickness. The body affords numerous similar instances of how it is capable
of rising to the occasion and increasing its defences. Just in the same
way, the presence of a toxin stimulates the living cells to produce more
and more antitoxin, and the blood remains rich in the antitoxin for a
considerable time afterwards. This explains why a person who has had an
infectious disease does not take it readily a second time; he is immune for
a certain number of years, because his blood is so rich in the antidote.
Now, the principle of serum treatment depends on those ascertained and
definitely proved facts. In the modern treatment of tuberculosis, for
example, the aim of the physician is to increase nature's method of cure:
good food and pure air do much to increase the healthiness of the blood and
fortify its natural power, of destroying the germs; sometimes this alone
suffices. At other times it is not sufficient, particularly if the disease
has advanced and the number of bacteria is too great for the enfeebled
white corpuscles to deal with. Then the physician goes a step farther, and
administers the appropriate opsonin by injecting it under the skin, again
simply increasing the resistance of his patient by a perfectly natural
method.
In the case of diphtheria, the antitoxin appears to be more efficacious
than an opsonin. A horse is inoculated with diphtheria, and when he has
recovered, his blood is collected. This blood is then rich in antitoxin,
the natural antidote that has enabled the horse to get well again. The
blood is allowed to clot, and the clot is removed; the fluid residue is
called serum, and the serum contains the antidote. If now another horse has
diphtheria, and you want to cure him quickly, what more natural than inject
the serum of the horse who has just recovered? it will save the second
horse the trouble and the time of making the antitoxin for himself, and it
has been proved over and over again that the second horse does recover with
amazing celerity.
The pathologists then advanced a step, and asked, Why should this antidote
be used solely for animals when they have diphtheria? Why should not the
horse's serum be beneficial to human beings when they are attacked with the
same disease? The diphtheria poison is much more harmful to a man, and
kills him more quickly than it does a horse; it is therefore imperative to
use the antidote early. The crucial experiment was made; entire success
followed it, and now, as Professor Richet says, it is the only treatment
employed, and any medical man who refuses to use it is little short of a
criminal.
I have entered into this brief and, I trust, simple explanation of serum
treatment, because so many people want to understand it and are unable to
comprehend the technical terms which scientific men, writing for scientific
readers, almost exclusively employ. I am even hopeful that some of the more
reasonable opponents of animal experimentation may be convinced that by
carrying out the new methods of serum therapy, we are not going against
nature but helping her. It is just these 'messy things' that nature uses
for curing infectious diseases, and the introduction of an opsonin or an
antitoxin is not putting matter in its wrong place, but in its right place;
and therefore the use of the terms filth and dirt in this relationship
should be confined either to the foul-mouthed or to the ignorant.
W. D. HALLIBURTON.
_July 1908._
P.S.--The proof sheets of Professor Richet's book have passed through my
hands during their issue from the press. Beyond a few verbal amendments,
and a footnote here and there which I have added and initialled, no
alterations have been made in the original.
I am also responsible for the insertion of Appendix C, regarding the aims
and objects of the Research Defence Society. These additions and minor
alterations have all met with Professor Richet's approval.
I may mention that the book has not yet been published in French, and is
presented to the public for the first time in English dress. The English
lady who collaborated with Professor Richet in its production has worked
with and studied under him for some years, and it was largely owing to her
persuasion that he consented to express his views publicly. She desires for
the present to remain anonymous.
W. D. H.
_October 1908._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE BY PROFESSOR HALLIBURTON v
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
THE NECESSARY LIMITS OF VIVISECTION 7
CHAPTER II
PAIN AND DEATH 18
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING ANÆSTHESIA IN VIVISECTION 31
CHAPTER IV
CONCERNING EXPERIMENTATION OTHER THAN VIVISECTION 40
CHAPTER V
SERVICES RENDERED TO SCIENCE AND HUMANITY BY EXPERIMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY 59
CHAPTER VI
MORALITY AND VIVISECTION 72
CHAPTER VII
ARE LAWS REGULATING VIVISECTION NECESSARY? 91
CHAPTER VIII
VIVISECTION AND THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE 97
POST SCRIPTUM 114
APPENDIX A.--DIPHTHERIA STATISTICS 121
APPENDIX B.--BIBLIOGRAPHY 124
APPENDIX C.--THE RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 130
ILLUSTRATIONS
"LA MORT." By BARTHOLOMÉ, in Père Lachaise, Paris, _Frontispiece_
PASTEUR IN HIS LABORATORY, _facing page_ 44
"L'ENFANT." In Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, " 53
INTRODUCTION
The object of this book is to set forth, as impartially as possible, the
reasons which militate for and against vivisection. It is, however, a
physiologist who is speaking, therefore no one will be surprised that he
should defend a practice which is at the basis of the science he teaches.
May he be permitted, at the same time, to express the high moral esteem
which he feels for all those who, nobly enamoured of a very high ideal,
deny to men the right of inflicting suffering, or even death, upon animals?
There is not a more generous thought than this. Without doubt it is our
duty to have sympathy for, and to abstain from indifference and cruelty in
our dealings with all living creatures: might does not constitute right.
Man is stronger than the animal; but this superiority of power, this might,
does not constitute a right to act contrary to moral obligation.
Morality does not consist solely of duties towards human beings; it is more
general: it extends to every being capable of suffering. The physiologist
is not an ignoramus, neither is he a barbarian; and he has right well
understood this duty. Physiologists have concluded that experimentation
upon living animals is necessary, and it is the many reasons which have led
them to this opinion which I propose to set forth. But it will, I hope, be
quite understood that my defence of vivisection implies no contempt, no
raillery, no unfriendly sentiment towards those who oppose it. My opponents
are not always courteous or loyal in their polemics; but that is of no
importance; and I shall reply only to such objections as are potent, able,
and rational. In other words, I shall take from among the arguments of
anti-vivisectionists those only which can be called legitimate, those which
deserve to be studied methodically and profoundly by every man of good
faith. I shall deliberately put on one side both abuse and nonsense.
I should here mention an anonymous leaflet which has received a
considerable amount of publicity in England ("How Scientific Cruelty is
defended," London, 1907, 4 pp.). In this leaflet, a reply is given to an
article which I once published on Vivisection. Certainly, after a lapse of
twenty-six years, I might claim the right to abjure some of the notions of
my youth. Taken as a whole, however, my ideas concerning vivisection have
changed but little, and I still consider it to be necessary. I of course
recognise that the number of physiological laboratories, which I estimated
at thirty in my article, is for present-day purposes too low. During the
last twenty-six years their number has very considerably increased. But a
laboratory of physiology does not necessarily mean a laboratory of
vivisection. There is the whole range of physiological chemistry, the study
of ferments and psychological physiology, not one of which makes any
demands on vivisection. Many eminent physiologists--for example, my former
master, M. Marey--have performed very little vivisection. Even in those
laboratories where vivisection is performed, it is not practised every day,
and especially not upon dogs! Far from it! In Paris, for example, where
every dog experimented upon is a stray animal handed over by the
prefecture of police, there are only about six hundred dogs per annum thus
available for experimentation. Now the laboratories in Paris represent,
from the point of view of activity, at least half of all the laboratories
in France put together.
It is alleged that Schiff stated to Mrs Anna Kingsford that he had
experimented on more than 14,000 dogs, that is to say, an average of one
dog a day for fifty years! This is obviously an exaggeration, though it is
difficult to trace now who was responsible for it.
Finally, the remaining objections of the anonymous author in question
amount only to this: The author believes that physiologists work for money
and renown, and not at all for the sake of humanity (!!). Also, that young
men are made cruel by the sight of cruel experiments. But the author simply
forgets this fact, that there is not at this present moment one single
_honourable_ physiologist who would consent to perform long and distressing
experiments on an animal not under anæsthetics. I hold no brief for those
who do otherwise, and I disapprove energetically of the use of _curare_.
The conclusions of my anonymous critic therefore fall to the ground.
I confess I do not understand the statement that experimentation on rabbits
and other animals is of no use to humanity; and my critic unfortunately
from his point of view has selected Claude Bernard's experiments as an
example of uselessness. Does he not know that Claude Bernard discovered the
presence of sugar in the blood, of glycogen in the liver, of diabetes
produced through nervous action, of the action of oxygen and of carbonic
oxide on the red blood corpuscles, the action of the pancreatic juice on
fat, the part played by the pneumogastric nerve in the innervation of the
heart? These discoveries not only rejuvenated physiology, but exercise a
permanent influence over the whole of medicine, and over the entire realm
of therapeutics! I refuse to accept the antiquated conception of an
empirical medicine which does not aim at discovering the truth; which
thinks solely of clumsy practical application; and which regards as useful
only that which leads immediately and directly to the cure of a given
illness. All truth is useful; all ignorance is baneful; and the sole limit
to man's power lies in the extent of his knowledge. We must forego
discussion with those who cannot understand this fundamental notion.
CHAPTER I
THE NECESSARY LIMITS OF VIVISECTION
First of all I declare, without fear of being contradicted by any
physiologist, that the past has witnessed much excess, almost guilty
excess, and that at the present time excess might still be pointed out. I
quite believe that, even to-day, here and there in the laboratories of
physiology, young men may be found who are no doubt enamoured of science,
but who have not sufficiently reflected on the nature of pain, and
consequently, through lack of sympathy, are callous and indifferent about
inflicting useless, or almost useless, tortures on innocent animals. On
this point I might mention numerous facts which are extremely painful to
relate, but which nevertheless we must have the courage to acknowledge and
denounce.
To quote only one instance, a most abominable one, I will mention the
following, which is old, dating back about forty years. In the veterinary
schools, surgical studies, at that time, were not made on the dead carcase,
but on the living animal; so that the wretched victim, generally a horse,
served as a subject, while yet alive, for all the operations which the
veterinary surgeon is called upon to perform. The detestable argument given
at that time to qualify this barbarism was that the veterinary surgeon
should be familiar with the reactions of a living animal, and that, as a
guarantee of being able to perform an operation on a diseased horse, he
should have already practised the same operation several times, not on the
dead body, but on a horse full of life and vigour, able to defend himself,
and obliged therefore to be held down motionless by special processes. But
this is scarcely a sufficient justification. But happily such things no
longer exist; public opinion, stimulated no doubt by the writings of
anti-vivisectionists, has altered the customs of veterinary
experimentalists so well that in no veterinary school to-day are surgical
exercises now performed on other than the dead body.
Thus, as far as surgery is concerned, unquestionably all vivisection
should rigorously be proscribed. I will discuss later the point as to
whether this interdiction should be moral--that is, recommended as a
precept of humanity, or enforced by law under penalty of imprisonment or
fine. For the moment it will suffice to establish the point that no living
animal should serve for surgical exercises.
I will go even further, and on this point my opinion will perhaps clash
with that of some of my friends and colleagues: I maintain that no
experimental physiological demonstrations which involve suffering should
ever be performed. Much abuse has taken place in experimentation for
instruction, which is a very different thing from experimentation for
investigation. Important as it may be to demonstrate physiological facts to
students, I do not consider that this importance is greater than the
suffering of an animal. And here again I will take an example, that of the
distinction between the motor nerves and the sensory nerves.
Magendie, in 1811, following up an idea somewhat hesitatingly put forth by
Charles Bell a few years previously, demonstrated that the anterior nerve
roots, starting from the spinal cord, give movement to the muscles, whilst
the posterior roots are exclusively devoted to sensibility; so that there
are anterior motor nerves and posterior sensory nerves. In order to
demonstrate this, it is evidently necessary to operate on a living and
sensitive animal.
The discovery was confirmed by several physiologists between 1830 and 1850;
and I do not think we have the right to repeat this cruel experiment for
the sake of the instruction of students. It is not only cruel, but also
useless, for it consists in laying bare the anterior and posterior
nerve-fibres of the spinal cord, with the sole object of allowing students
to see that the excitation of the anterior nerve-fibres provokes movement
and not pain, whilst the excitation of posterior nerve-fibres provokes pain
and not movement. Now, in order to make students clearly understand this
distinction between the motor and sensory nerves, I require only a
blackboard and a piece of chalk; and I claim that, with a piece of chalk
and a blackboard, I am able to explain very clearly all the details of this
phenomenon. Not only does the chalk suffice for comprehension as well as
vivisection, but it is better; because the experiment is so delicate, so
difficult, and, in order to be understood, it must be observed so narrowly,
so closely, that out of the whole class scarcely two or three students are
able to follow the experiment. The rest of the class have before them only
the frightful spectacle of the reactions of a mutilated, suffering animal
under excitations which are made in the very depths of a wound on organs
which they do not see.
This experiment is rendered more particularly cruel by the fact that
anæsthetics cannot be used, precisely because the point in question is the
sensibility or non-sensibility of the animal, and consequently by its very
nature the operation cannot be made on the insensible animal.[1]
And now, at once entering further into the difficulty of the problem of
vivisection, we may ask ourselves if we have the right to allow
demonstrations of experimental physiology on living animals that have been
rendered insensible by chloroform.
Although, further on, I intend coming back to this important question of
anæsthetics, I will say at once I do not understand what repugnance there
can be to operating upon an anæsthetised animal. Once he is insensible he
cannot suffer; why hesitate, therefore, to perform prolonged experiments
upon that insensible being? It appears to me just as inhuman to boil milk
as to excite the pneumogastric nerve of a dog rendered incapable of
suffering. The milk does not suffer; the dog does not suffer; in both cases
it is living matter, but insensible living matter. Consequently, as far as
physiological demonstrations are concerned, every individual capable of
reflection should recognise that there is nothing wrong in experimenting
upon animals that cannot suffer.
I shall, however, make two restrictions. The first is that professors
should energetically call the attention of the pupils to the fact that the
animal is insensible, and that no one has the right to make the experiment
upon a sensitive animal; that we, physiologists, more than all other men,
are under the obligation of dealing humanely with animals. The professor of
physiology should take advantage of the occasion to develop in his hearers
the best and noblest sentiments, those of pity and of generosity. In a
word, he should excuse himself, so to speak, for performing vivisection,
and prove that such is only legitimate when it entails no suffering.
The second restriction is that the animal thus chloroformed or anæsthetised
should never be permitted to awaken. If he shows the slightest sign of
sensibility, he should be given chloroform until anæsthesia is complete,
and, finally, he ought to be killed after the experiment, without allowing
him to regain consciousness.
After all, death under these conditions is a painless end. We ourselves,
who will disappear after a long, and certainly painful, agony, in those
weary moments of pain which will precede our end, shall envy that absence
of suffering, that rapid end of all pain, which is the death of an animal
under an anæsthetic.
Let us, therefore, banish every painful experiment the object of which is
purely didactic. Moreover, I fail to see what experiments in painful
vivisection are necessary for the teaching of physiology. Studies on reflex
movement can be made perfectly well on a decapitated animal; and in that
case it is well understood that there can be no question of pain; for it
would be absurd to suppose that the spinal cord possesses the power of
receiving the notion of pain. Such a supposition would mean the negation of
the best-established facts of physiology.
Experiments on the heart (notably of the frog and the tortoise) are
performed very much better on a decapitated animal than on an animal which
is intact; and experiments can even be made on the heart separated from the
organism. It would be downright puerile to lack the courage to watch the
beating of the living heart of a dead tortoise! As for the mammalia, all
experiments on the heart and on the respiration necessary in a course of
lectures on physiology are admirably carried out on an animal rendered
completely insensible.[2]
We have not, however, quite finished with the difficulties of physiological
instruction: there are certain poisons for which chloroform cannot be used.
As the essential property of chloroform is to deaden the nervous cells, the
effects of some poisons cannot be studied in an animal profoundly
chloroformed. We can watch very well indeed the effects of carbonic oxide,
which poisons the blood, but many other poisons no longer produce their
characteristic symptoms; nevertheless, it is of the highest importance to
show medical students the effects of certain formidable toxic substances.
Permit me to quote myself. However little I may be a partisan of painful
experimental demonstrations, I make one exception for an experiment which I
consider it essential to present, in all its horror, before the young men
who attend my lectures. I refer to absinthe. If two or three drops of
essence of absinthe are injected into the veins of a dog, he is at once
seized by a violent attack of epilepsy with hallucinations, convulsions,
and foaming at the mouth. It is truly a terrible sight, one which fills
with disgust and horror all who have witnessed this experiment. But it is
precisely for the sake of arousing this disgust, this horror, that I
perform the experiment. The unfortunate dog will, during ten minutes, have
had an attack of intoxication and absinthian epilepsy; but at the end of an
hour he will have recovered completely. At the same time, the two hundred
students who have witnessed this hideous spectacle will retain, profoundly
engraved on their minds, the memory of that epileptic fury, a memory which
will remain with them to the end of their days. They will then be able, by
their propaganda against absinthe, to exercise around them a salutary
influence, to prevent perhaps ten, fifteen, one hundred human personalities
from destroying themselves by the use of this abominable poison. After all,
it is better to give a dog ten minutes of absinthism than to allow twenty
human families to be plunged, by absinthism, into degradation and misery.
Finally, as far as surgical exercises are concerned, _they should never be
made on a living animal_; as regards demonstrations of experimental
physiology intended for instruction, _they should be made only on
decapitated or anæsthetised animals_; and as for intoxications,[3] save on
very rare and altogether exceptional occasions, _they should not be made
the object of experimental demonstrations_.
It seems to me that these formal declarations might be accepted by every
physiologist as well as by every anti-vivisectionist.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The usages in English laboratories in relation to this experiment are
in accord with Professor Richet's views.--(W. D. H.)
[2] It may not be known to many readers, that it is possible to keep alive
for hours and even days the heart entirely removed from the body of a dead
mammal. On such a heart the action of drugs can be admirably studied and
demonstrated. I once had in my own laboratory a rabbit's heart that
continued to beat for nearly five days after the remainder of the rabbit
had served for the dinner of my laboratory attendant.--(W. D. H.)
[3] The word intoxication here and elsewhere is used in its literal sense,
viz., poisoning. It is not limited, as in popular parlance, to the
poisonous effects of alcohol.--(W. D. H.)
CHAPTER II
PAIN AND DEATH
We have not yet touched at the root of the problem, for physiology is not
mere demonstration. The real point at issue is the search for new truths.
The demonstration of an acquired truth, however important this may be, must
not be confused with the research for an unknown truth. Now, physiologists
claim that they have not only the right--but that it is their duty--to
inflict some suffering on animals, if by so doing they diminish human
suffering. I am going to put this proposition to the test.
1. It is universally recognised, except perhaps by the Brahmans, that we
have the right to kill dangerous or offensive animals. I do not believe
there is a man foolish enough not to kill a mosquito which is stinging him.
No one would hesitate to crush a viper which is on the point of biting
him, or the caterpillar which is eating the leaves of his fruit trees. If
an invasion of locusts threatens our harvest, we have the right to stamp
out these legions of enemies. To refuse man the right to defend himself
against his animal foes is such a ridiculous proposition that it is useless
even to attempt to combat it.
Not only have we the right to wage war against offensive animals, such as
rats, mice, caterpillars, locusts, bugs, mosquitoes, serpents, wolves,
tigers, hyaenas, and all ferocious and mischievous animals, but we have
also the right to kill such animals as are necessary for our nourishment. I
am quite aware of the fact that certain religions proscribe the use of
meat. I am also aware that an exclusively vegetable alimentation might be
substituted for our customary mixed diet, which is both animal and
vegetable. But, though a vegetable alimentation is possible, our western
civilisation is bound up with the principle of a mixed diet in the ordinary
conditions of life. If, indeed, alimentation should be exclusively
vegetable, it would be useless to hunt, to fish, to rear poultry, to breed
cattle for the market; and it would be necessary to confine our nutriment
exclusively to wheat, corn, maize, rice, herbs, and fruits. Undoubtedly
man, thus nourished, could live, and indeed live very well; but
vegetarianism would be such a radical reform in our customs that in an
article bearing solely upon vivisection I cannot handle such a vast
problem.
I recognise that those anti-vivisectionists who are at the same time strict
vegetarians are consistent; they live entirely on fruit and vegetables,
make no use of animal flesh, for they contest the right of man to kill an
animal for his nourishment. It is difficult to reply to such vegetarian,[4]
for, after all, animal alimentation is not indispensable to human life. But
we must take things as they actually exist. The bulk of my readers and the
majority of anti-vivisectionists are not vegetarians; and it is only an
innocent pastime to build up new civilisations in the fantastic realms of
Utopia.
We are not, then, addressing ourselves to vegetarians, but to those
anti-vivisectionists who feel no compunction in drinking broth or milk or
eating the wing of a chicken, who do not shrink with horror from the sight
of a cutlet, and who are capable of eating meat twice a day throughout the
whole term of their existence. These people know full well that it was
necessary to kill the animal which serves them for food: the ox was beaten
to death; the sheep had its throat cut open; the pig was bled to death; the
cod and the sardine were suffocated. I pass over the tortures which special
preparations and elegant sports inflict on the animal for the mere savour
of our meals: geese stuffed by force for months whilst nailed down to
boards; pheasants, partridges, hares, slaughtered in the hunt; fish thrown
into boats, gasping and finally dying after long, agonising struggles. All
these and other tortures are inflicted by man on the animal in order to
satisfy his pleasure and his appetite.
Perhaps these anti-vivisectionists have never visited a slaughter-house
when the moment for killing the sheep has arrived. There, bound and
stretched out on an immense table, are to be seen five hundred unfortunate
sheep, with their throats thrust forth. The butcher passes in front and,
with a stroke of his knife, slashes open the neck and throat of the poor
wretches; the blood spouts out, convulsions rend the body, and only at the
end of one minute or one and a half minutes does death supervene. This is
death in all its savage horror inflicted by man on the animal. There are
anti-vivisectionists who accept this. Therefore, they recognise implicitly
man's right to kill animals, since they profit by such slaughter for their
alimentation; they add, however, that though man has a right to kill, he
has no right to cause suffering. Is there no suffering in the
slaughter-house? Are anæsthetics ever dreamt of there?
2. Now it is impossible to point out the boundary line which separates the
being that suffers from the being that does not suffer; and I defy any one
to establish any line of demarcation whatsoever between a being capable of
pain and a being incapable of pain.
Plants certainly do not suffer. Already, however, there are certain
difficulties in the way of determining the exact boundary line between the
animal and the plant. When we expose an infusion of hay to the air, for
instance, various microbes develop therein. A learned and minute analysis
allows us to distinguish both bacteria and infusoria among the innumerable
micro-organisms which swarm in the infusion. Now we know that bacteria are
plants and infusoria are animals. If, therefore, all animal life were
eliminated from experimentation, we should have no right to boil an
infusion of hay, because we know that it contains infusoria which are
animals.
These infusoria are so closely related to bacteria that they may be
confused with the latter, as indeed has been the case up to the last few
years. A number of inferior beings were formerly called zoophytes, that is
to say, animal plants; and it is sheer nonsense to suppose that they are
conscious of pain. Sponges, corals, sea-anemones, star-fishes, sea-urchins,
possess a nervous system which is so little developed, and reactions which
are so indistinct, that we can scarcely suppose they possess an intelligent
consciousness, and, consequently, sensibility to pain. Moreover, I do not
see how their reactions would differ if they possessed the notion of pain.
When we touch the tentacles of a star-fish, we notice, near the tentacles
touched, a sort of agitation set up among the neighbouring tentacles, but
this agitation does not extend to the tentacles of the others' arms; so
that a general consciousness does not appear to exist, unless it be in a
prodigiously rudimentary state, among inferior beings. In certain classes
of the mollusca there is no head. Thus oysters and mussels, named on that
account _acephala_, have in all probability no consciousness. I would have
no scruple, therefore, either in eating living oysters, or in experimenting
upon living oysters and mussels, since it seems to me evident that the
notion of pain does not exist in them.
It is not the same thing with insects; it is here that the first signs of
pain begin to appear. Nevertheless, we must be careful to avoid confusing
pain with signs of pain. When we take a worm and cut it into three
segments, each of these segments will struggle and writhe in a perfect
frenzy. It would, therefore, be necessary to admit that pain existed in
each of these three segments--in other words, that each fragment possesses
a central seat of pain, which is absurd; it is much more rational to
suppose that the perturbed movements of the animal are the result of a
strong nervous excitation, and that the injury is accompanied by defensive
reflex movements but provokes no painful perception.
Among the superior animals however, and especially among the vertebrata,
pain exists. There can be no doubt about this, although it is impossible to
know exactly in what consists the consciousness of pain in an animal; the
most profound obscurity still reigns, and will perhaps always reign, over
their consciousness and sensations. It would be ridiculous to deny that a
dog suffers when his paw is crushed. Certainly, I fully believe that all
pain is much less clearly perceived by the dog than by man. But, after all,
it is a phenomenon of the same order and identical, save in intensity.
Now pain, taken in its profoundest sense, consists of two essential
elements: a shock to the conscious self, the _ego_, in the first place;
and, in the second place, the prolongation of the shock. If the self is
not distinctly conscious, if it does not go so far as to assert itself by
the separation of that self from the external world, we cannot say that
pain is possible. The _ego_ never asserts itself with so much force as
under a very painful impression. So that among beings whose reactions are
mechanical, automatic, governed by other forces than by the assertion of
the self and a freely deliberate will, pain becomes so indistinct, so
confused, that it probably does not exist in the strict psychological sense
at all. The greatest philosopher of modern times, Descartes, imagined a
system of machine-animals; this idea has been turned into ridicule by the
ignorant, but nevertheless we are almost forced to return to it when we
dive to the bottom of reflex movements. Now, if we are able to admit that
there is a vague consciousness of the selfhood among superior animals, such
as the mammalia and birds, this consciousness, as far as concerns the
inferior vertebrata, is most certainly extremely hazy, if, indeed, it
exists at all. I have difficulty in conceiving that a frog is able to
ponder over its _ego_, assert its existence in presence of the external
world, and say or think, I SUFFER. No being suffers unless he is able to
think that he suffers, and meditate on his suffering. To suffer means to
have consciousness; and as far as it is permissible for a man to picture to
himself the sensations of a frog, I should say that the frog has no
consciousness of suffering.
Even as regards the more highly developed vertebrata, such as birds,
rabbits, and guinea-pigs, suffering is probably of a very obscure nature.
It is not enough to say that an animal suffers because we see him animated
by the contortions and reactions of defence. The new-born infant, which has
neither intelligence nor memory nor consciousness, is probably incapable of
real conscious suffering, nevertheless it screams and cries when it is
hungry or when it is pricked. But these screams and tears do not suffice to
allow us to affirm that the child is suffering real pain. It is a nervous
excitation which is translated by the reactions of defence; it is not the
conscious assertion of an _ego_ which has been painfully perturbed.
Further, for pain to exist the impression must be durable and not
fugitive. The assertion of the _ego_ is not enough. It must be prolonged. A
pain, however intense we may suppose it to be, which traverses the organism
for a second and which leaves no painful echo behind it, is no real pain. I
will allow any one to inflict the most excruciating tortures on me if he
can assure me that, at the end of one second, I shall have lost all
recollection of the suffering and that no trace of the torture will remain.
The extraction of a tooth lasts perhaps only half a second, but you
remember it all your life. In any case, for several minutes the pain
continues to be atrocious. Therefore we may certainly consider that pain is
a phenomenon of memory. Pain is an empty word for every being that has no
memory.
From these facts we may evolve the general conclusion that, under penalty
of falling into vulgar anthromorphism, we cannot apply to the pain of
animals the data which have been gathered on human pain.[5] With man, the
developed intelligence and vivacious memory enable pain to acquire an
extreme intensity. But with animals, in proportion as the intelligence
lessens and the memory becomes more rudimentary, so does pain diminish,
and, without having the right to be very affirmative, as we are in profound
darkness concerning the consciousness of animals, it appears to me that, as
we descend the scale of the animal kingdom, pain rapidly becomes very hazy,
scarcely perceived, and as indistinct as the consciousness of the _ego_.
We have, therefore, the right to perform vivisection on beings which,
because they possess no _selfhood_, do not suffer. Now, this absence of
memory, consciousness, and intelligence extends assuredly over the whole of
the vegetable kingdom, almost certainly over all the groups of the
invertebrata, and also probably over all the inferior vertebrata.
Finally, there remain only the mammalia and birds which are capable of real
pain. Although this pain may be obscure and indistinct, it is certain; and
we must take it into consideration or fall into barbarism; therefore we
shall restrict the problem of vivisection to the vivisection of superior
animals, who, alone, are capable of suffering.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The true vegetarian is an extremely rare person. The usual so-called
vegetarian ought more properly to be called a non-meat eater, for he does
not scruple to consume milk (intended by nature for the calf) and milk
products (cream, cheese, and butter) and eggs, nor to wear garments made of
wool and leather.--(W. D. H.)
[5] In the little leaflet already referred to, quotation is made of a
sentence from Professor Pritchard, which says that the various animals have
a skin of different thickness, but that sensibility is the same among all,
including man. It seems to me that Professor Pritchard has scarcely looked
into the questions of general psychology.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING ANÆSTHESIA IN VIVISECTION
A few words are first of all necessary to indicate precisely what
anæsthesia is.
By definition, an anæsthetic is a substance which, without paralysing the
activity of the heart and the respiration, abolishes sensibility. Indeed,
whenever general sensibility is abolished, there is, at the same time,
abolition of consciousness, of intelligence, and of memory. Another
characteristic of an anæsthetic is that its action is of a transient
nature. At the end of a certain time, it disappears; and then intelligence,
consciousness, and memory return gradually with sensibility.
It is well known that the admirable discovery of general anæsthesia,
allowing operations to be performed on man without the accompaniment of
pain, was due to chance. It was an American dentist, Horace Wells, and his
colleague, Morton (and others also perhaps), who discovered by chance that
protoxide of nitrogen (commonly called laughing gas) has the power, when
inhaled, of annulling all sensibility to pain for a certain length of
time--sufficiently long for a surgical operation (1840). Then they
discovered the effects of ether (1842). Since then, many other anæsthetics
have been introduced, notably chloroform, prepared by Soubeiran in 1832,
but the anæsthetic properties of which were only discovered in 1847 by
Flourens and Simpson; so that physiologists and surgeons are now quite
familiar with the mode of action of anæsthetics.
Anæsthetics, in appropriate doses, poison the nervous cells, which are the
seat of intelligence and sensibility, but leave unimpaired the functions of
the cardiac nervous system and of the nervous system governing the
respiration. An individual under chloroform breathes regularly; his heart
beats rhythmically, but all intelligence has disappeared; he has no longer
any will or memory or reflex actions, and the most painful operations can
be performed on him without provoking the smallest phenomenon of
sensibility.
Further, we have no hesitation in asserting that the anæsthetised animal
behaves like the anæsthetised man; that is to say, chloroform given to an
animal abolishes all sensibility to pain. Vivisection, therefore, on an
anæsthetised animal, does not provoke any pain. Physiologists are so
convinced of this that, however humane they may be, they have no scruple in
performing lengthy vivisections on an animal which is thoroughly
anæsthetised.
If chloroform, for some reason or other, cannot be employed, many other
anæsthetics, such as chloral and morphia, may be used. Chloral, in certain
doses, produces complete anæsthesia, and it is easier to administer than
chloroform. Formerly, chloral was injected, by a small puncture, into the
veins of rabbits and dogs. I pointed out another method which allows one to
avoid even the puncture; it is sufficient to make a rectal injection of the
solution of chloral. In two or three minutes, the dog, the rabbit, or the
guinea-pig, is seized with a kind of inebriety; he staggers, falls to the
ground, and in about ten minutes he is completely anæsthetised. Large doses
of morphia can be injected into animals without causing immediate death.
An animal under a moderate dose of morphia does not absolutely lose all
sensibility to pain; but the slight pain which he then feels is very
transient. If the animal is submitted to strong excitation, he wakens for a
few seconds, but soon falls back again into profound slumber. Morphia in
moderate doses is not such a perfect anæsthetic as chloral or chloroform;
it is therefore usual under such circumstances to administer also volatile
anæsthetics like chloroform, and quite small quantities of the latter will
then produce perfect anæsthesia. If, however, morphia is given in lethal
doses, as is sometimes done for comparatively short experiments, it is an
absolutely complete anæsthetic in itself, just as it is when a man takes a
fatal dose of morphia, or of its parent substance, opium.
Nevertheless, chloroform, chloral, and ether have a very serious
disadvantage for the physiologist. They abolish sensibility, but, at the
same time, they abolish the majority of the reflex actions in which
voluntary muscles are concerned. Now, in many experiments, it is
indispensable to be able to study such reflex movements, that is to say,
the fundamental reactions of the nervous system. Thus, physiologists, more
preoccupied, it must be said, with assuring the immobility than the
insensibility of the animal, have had recourse to another substance,
_curare_, the properties of which were investigated by Claude Bernard.
Curare is a poison which the natives on the banks of the Amazon prepare
from a bind-weed of the strychnia family. They boil the plant with several
ingredients, finally obtaining a sort of blackish resin, or gummy juice,
which they place in little gourds, which can be procured also in Europe.
This juice is used by South American Indians for their arrows, and
physiologists use it to ensure the immobility of the animal on which they
are experimenting. Curare dissolves in water, and a solution of a few
centigrams injected under the skin of a dog, a cat, a rabbit, will bring
about the death of the animal in a few minutes. But death is not due to the
arrest of the heart's action, it is due entirely to paralysis of the
respiration. Therefore the curarised animal can continue to live for
several hours if _artificial_ breathing be substituted for the natural
breathing which is paralysed. For several hours the animal is completely
motionless; the heart beats with force and regularity, provided that the
insufflation of air into the lungs introduces into the blood the quantity
of oxygen necessary for the life of the tissues. Now, under these
conditions, as Claude Bernard has so well demonstrated, we have no proof
that sensibility is abolished also. There is immobility; there is no true
anæsthesia. Take two animals, one chloroformed, the other curarised; both
are equally inert; but the chloroformed animal is insensible, whilst the
curarised animal retains sensibility.
It is impossible, therefore, to say that curare replaces anæsthetics,
because _curare is not an anæsthetic_.[6]
Now, in 1894 I was able to discover a substance which has all the
anæsthetic properties of chloroform, and which nevertheless does not
abolish reflex actions, so that physiologists are able to use it for
experiments which, formerly, necessitated the use of curare. This substance
is called _chloralose_; it is obtained by mixing anhydrous chloral with
glucose. It is not necessary for me to describe here in detail its chemical
or physiological properties; I will only say that in very small doses
(about twenty-five centigrams) it is an excellent hypnotic for man, and
that in larger doses, injected into the vein of a dog or a rabbit, it
brings about complete anæsthesia without affecting either the breathing,
the heart, or the reflex actions.
Since this discovery, many physiologists--and I regret not to be able to
say so of every physiologist--have given up curare and use nothing but
chloralose, which is a perfect anæsthetic, and which allows the reflex
actions to be studied although anæsthesia is perfect.
It may be objected that a tiny puncture has to be made in the vein to
introduce the chloralose into the circulation; but this puncture is really
such a trifle that it would be sheer childishness to pay any attention to
it. What doctor would hesitate to make a puncture in the skin of his
patient for the injection of a solution of morphia? However, if
sentimentality be pushed to such a degree as to shrink from touching the
vein of a dog in order to put him to sleep, even this tiny puncture can be
avoided by mixing the chloralose with the food of the animal to be
experimented upon. In half an hour or three-quarters of an hour after the
mixture is given he is in a state of perfect anæsthesia.
For these reasons, vivisection with anæsthesia seems to me to be quite
legitimate. As soon as it is recognised that man has the right to kill the
animal, he has the right to kill him as he pleases, provided he spares him
all suffering.
Let us also reflect a little on this point: an animal has to die just as
much as we ourselves. Now, natural death would certainly be for him a long
and cruel agony, lasting several hours, several days, perhaps several
weeks. Well, then, we replace hideous old age, the agony of prolonged
tortures due to disease, by a dreamless sleep, which at once plunges the
animal into nothingness, without his passing through the intermediary stage
of necessary suffering. Is this what is called being inhuman? For my part,
I shall regret on my death-bed that no physiologist will be found whose
conscience will permit him, or, if so, who would have sufficient courage to
help me to pass away under the influence of chloroform, ether, chloralose,
morphia, or chloral, thus saving me from the throes of the final struggle,
and bestowing upon me a peaceful death and an easy termination of all
suffering.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] In England, the Vivisection Act expressly states that curare is not to
be regarded as an anæsthetic, and this proviso has been loyally accepted by
English physiologists. On those rare occasions when curare is used, and the
occasions are very rare indeed, and year by year they become rarer, a
volatile anæsthetic such as chloroform or A.C.E. (alcohol, chloroform,
ether) mixture is administered at the same time in sufficient amount to
render anæsthesia absolute. One should add that since Claude Bernard's work
on curare, physiologists have seen reason for doubting whether it leaves
sensibility intact, as Bernard thought. But as there is doubt on the
question, and the available evidence in favour of its lulling sensations is
small, it is still considered advisable to retain Bernard's views, and act
as though it is not an anæsthetic at all.--(W. D. H.)
CHAPTER IV
CONCERNING EXPERIMENTATION OTHER THAN VIVISECTION
We must, however, give to the word "Vivisection" its largest acceptation.
It is not only a question of cutting nerves, of stimulating the glands, or
of exciting the muscles. There are experiments of much longer duration in
which there is no mutilation properly speaking, but _intoxication_,[7]
produced by the injection of poisons and disease germs.
It is, indeed, evident that pain can be provoked in other ways than by a
sharp-edged instrument, which can always be done under anæsthesia. But may
inoculation be performed? May prolonged _intoxication_ be caused? To treat
the question in all its fulness, we will put the problem in the following
manner.
In order to study a disease, have we the right to give that disease to an
animal?
For my part, there can be no doubt on the point, and I affirm that such is
our right.
As a matter of fact, and as every unbiassed person is forced to recognise,
it is only by experimentation that these diseases can be studied
thoroughly. Clinical observation, bearing exclusively upon man, can only
give incomplete results, much poorer, though its documents are
multitudinous, than the results furnished by experimentation, which can be
infinitely varied at will. If we were limited to the Hippocratic method of
observation, which consists in studying the symptoms and the progress of a
morbid affliction, we should be reduced to poor enough resources; and if
meditation on the aphorisms of Hippocrates constituted the whole extent of
our medical science, medical science would be a sad vacuum. Fortunately,
however, such is not the case. Marvellous progress has been realised, which
allows us to entertain quite other ideas than those of the Father of
Medicine on the nature of diseases, and consequently on their treatment and
their prevention. Those very persons who rise up in arms against
physiological experimentation would not, I imagine, desire to be handed
over to the care of a Hippocratic doctor if they were ill, to a doctor who
took no notice of any modern discoveries under the pretext that they were
acquired by experimentation _in anima vili_.
If, however, we wish to discuss the problem thoroughly, it will not do to
remain on indefinite ground. Let us arrive at precise facts. I will mention
only three discoveries, the importance of which is considerable, and which
have been established solely by experimentation.
First of all, there is _antisepsis_. For centuries and centuries surgeons
operated without understanding why it was that death struck down so
unmercifully those operated upon. In vain did surgeons display great skill;
in vain did the operation succeed: the patient died. Erysipelas, lock-jaw,
abscess-formation and gangrene reigned supreme. Every confinement exposed
the mother to death; the slightest wounds were followed by the most serious
after-effects; in certain amputations, for instance, the mortality was 70
per cent. No one dared to touch either the peritoneum or the joints,
because every operation on the peritoneum or on the articulations was sure
to prove fatal. But Lister and Pasteur came! These two men, simultaneously
and concurrently, demonstrated that all disease following on an operation
was the result of infection by parasites. By preventing the wounds from
being contaminated by parasites, infection was prevented; for the wounds
themselves are innocent, as long as they are not infected.
This is the astounding and simple truth which Lister and Pasteur
established. And let no one pretend it is so simple that the data could
have been furnished by clinical observation alone, for such an assertion
would be contradicted by the facts.
Thousands and thousands of surgeons, right up to 1868, had understood
nothing of infection. In order to understand this big word "infection,"
which sums up in itself the whole of surgery and the whole of medicine, it
was necessary to inject pus into animals, gather the microbes which then
developed in the blood of these animals, isolate the microbes, cultivate
them, inject them afresh, and produce an experimental disease. It was in
this manner only that we were able to understand the mechanism of
antisepsis, and, consequently, apply it to the treatment of operations and
wounds. Three or four volumes could be written on this subject alone, but
all I can attempt here is a summary of the main points. I say without
hesitation that as long as clinical medicine confined itself only to the
observation of patients, it was able to understand nothing, to analyse
nothing, to foresee nothing. It was necessary to experiment, to sacrifice a
few hundred mice, rats, and rabbits, in order to demonstrate that
erysipelas is an inoculable disease, that puerperal infection is of the
same nature as purulent infection, that all these diseases are due to
micro-organisms, and that certain substances, called antiseptics, can stop
the development of these fatal germs.
It appears quite natural to-day (and it seems to simple minds, ignorant of
the past and powerless to imagine the past, that these notions have been
current from all eternity) to know that instruments, water, and linen
heated to 120° contain no living germs. But this discovery is not so very
old. It was Pasteur who, between 1863 and 1873, established it by some
memorable experiments at the cost of a little disease given to rats and
guinea-pigs.
[Illustration: PASTEUR IN HIS LABORATORY.
_facing p. 44._]
Now--and I appeal to the good sense of my readers--would it be better to
efface the suffering of those rats, those guinea-pigs, those rabbits, and
return to the olden times when the mortality in lying-in hospitals was
often 40 per cent. (it is to-day, 0.02 per cent.!)? Must we condemn Lister
and Pasteur as great criminals because they dared to inoculate microbes
into a few rabbits and bring about in those unfortunate animals--they would
have died a long time ago even without that--experimental ailments in order
to ward off malignant diseases from thousands and thousands of human
beings?
* * * * *
The second discovery which I shall mention is that of the infectiousness of
tuberculosis. Thousands and thousands of doctors had had tuberculous
patients under their care. Three thousand years ago, Hippocrates described
tuberculosis with as much precision as could be done to-day. Illustrious
physicians in every land had tried to analyse the nature of this terrible
disease and to unravel its cause; nevertheless, they were unable, from
clinical observation alone, to prove what is to-day quite commonplace
knowledge, viz., that tuberculosis is infectious. In 1864, a French doctor,
Villemin, conceived the simple and ingenious idea of inoculating rabbits
with the tuberculous matter found in the lungs of consumptive patients.
These rabbits became tuberculous; they died in a few weeks with tuberculous
granulations in lungs and liver. It was thus demonstrated that tuberculosis
was infectious. Later on, in 1878, Koch discovered that the active agent of
this infection is a special microbe. But, however important may be the
discovery of the microbe of tuberculosis (the tubercle-bacillus of Koch),
the essential dominating fact is that tuberculosis is infectious.
As soon as this great fact became known, a profound revolution occurred in
social hygiene, in the treatment and in the prevention of this terrible
evil. We know now the consumptive man carries in his lungs and sputum the
germ capable of developing the same evil in others; consequently we know
how to preserve ourselves against tuberculosis. We must purify or destroy
the habitations wherein consumptives have lived, burn or carbolise all the
sputum, make spitting in public places a punishable offence, take sanitary
measures against unhealthy meat, defend our children against contaminated
milk--in a word, we are armed against a disease, the sole and unique cause
of which, as experimentation alone has taught us, is infection.
Formerly it was believed that diseases were due to a sort of divine anger,
or, what amounts pretty much to the same thing, to certain imperceptible
epidemic exhalations stretching over whole populations, or attacking
isolated individuals, striking like an exterminating angel, as his fancy
chose, such or such an unhappy victim. A sort of will or caprice, governed
only by chance, was exercised in relation to this disease, and man was
powerless, because he was unarmed against chance. He did not even think of
it. He resigned himself to being ill, and waited for the disease, without
doing anything to fight against it, benumbed under a kind of Oriental
fatalism. The doctor shook his head, bore testimony to the evil, and
confined himself to prescribing inefficacious treatments which were only,
according to a celebrated saying, a long meditation on death.
But the times have changed; there is no longer any fatality in
tuberculosis; there is imprudence, there is error, there is vice, and,
specially, social vice. We may almost say that, if there are still
consumptives in our midst, it is because of our defective social
institutions. We leave innumerable populations steeped in misery, seven or
eight individuals living in the same infected hovel. In the slums of our
large cities, swarms of infants are to be found morally and materially
perverted by misery. Therefore, if consumption still exists, it is our own
fault; it is no longer as it was in olden times, when we knew not, because
_now_ we know. The plague can be battled with; and if it still has so much
power left, it is because we have not the courage to apply to public and
individual hygiene the treatment science has definitely shown us should be
applied. To foresee is to know; and now that we know, we must not forget
that it is to experimenters, and to experimenters alone, that we are
indebted for this great benefit.
Moreover, however imperfect our defence against tuberculosis may still be,
it is by no means _nil_; great progress has been made; the mortality has
decreased in a considerable proportion. During the last twenty-five years,
it has decreased by about 25 per cent., and notably in England, where the
laws of public hygiene, energetically upheld by the good sense of the
people, are strictly applied, the mortality has diminished by 50 per cent.
This is only a beginning, and the near future will bring about the complete
extermination of the disease.
Now, honestly, I ask if the rabbits which Villemin sacrificed weigh more in
the scales of universal progress, and even in public morality, than the
three millions of individuals who, by progress in hygiene, have been
preserved from an early and painful death. I estimate at a high price the
life and the sufferings of fifty rabbits, but, at the risk of appearing a
barbarian, I prefer, to these fifty rabbits, the three millions of young
people who have been saved by Villemin's discovery, and the millions which
it will still save.
All the more so, inasmuch as experimental studies on tuberculosis have not
only preserved men; they have also preserved animals. Thanks to Koch, there
is now a very simple way of recognising if an animal is or is not
tuberculous. Koch was able to extract from tubercle bacilli, a substance
which he has called _tuberculin_. At first he thought tuberculin cured the
disease; but this was an error. Subsequent experiments showed that
tuberculin exercised quite a different action to that of healing. It has
the property, when injected in small doses into a tuberculous animal, of
provoking an intense fever, whilst it produces no reaction whatsoever in a
normal animal. If, therefore, tuberculin is injected into every animal in
the cattle shed, we can feel sure--and this is impossible otherwise--that
such or such animals are tuberculous or healthy. All cows that show a rise
in temperature after an injection of tuberculin are tuberculous; the
others, on the contrary, are in good health.
Thus the sanitary inspection of stables and cattle-sheds can be carried out
thoroughly; and we are now able to protect not only men but also animals
from the disease of tuberculosis.
Such results could only have been obtained at the cost of many and
methodical experiments. Whatever may be the genius of anti-vivisectionists,
they would never have been able to imagine anything similar had they been
left to their own intellectual powers. It is not in the study that we are
able to discover this long series of unforeseen, extraordinary, almost
miraculous facts which laboratory experimentation has been able to find
out. Man, said Pascal, tires of conceiving sooner than Nature tires of
providing; and experimentation is man's method of interrogating Nature.
* * * * *
The third discovery which I shall take as an example demonstrating the
value of experimentation, is the history of _Serotherapy_. And I may be
permitted to dwell somewhat on this subject as I had the good fortune, in
1888, of making the decisive experiment which was the beginning of
serotherapy.
Whilst inoculating some rabbits and dogs with a microbe taken from pus
(_Staphylococcus pyosepticus_), I developed a certain disease both in the
rabbits and in the dogs. But the dogs did not die, whilst all the rabbits
died from the results of the inoculation. I thought then that, the cause of
that resistance being due to the difference of blood, I might be able to
make the rabbit refractory to the infection by injecting it with the blood
of a dog in normal health. The experiment succeeded. The rabbits which had
received the blood of the dog, when they were afterwards infected with the
staphylococcus, became very ill but did not die. Later on, I took, not the
blood of a dog in normal health, but the blood of a dog that had received
the infection of the staphylococcus and had recovered from that infection,
and I injected this blood into the rabbits. _Now the rabbits that received
the blood of the infected, healed dog had acquired complete immunity to
this form of microbe infection_: the principle of serotherapy was
discovered (5th Nov. 1888).
[Illustration: "L'ENFANT."
_In Musée du Luxembourg, Paris._
_facing p. 53._]
Since then, serotherapy has been applied, by Behring in Germany and by Roux
in France, to diphtheria (1892). These two savants showed that the blood of
animals, and especially of horses, that had been infected with diphtheria
and cured, could, when injected into patients attacked by diphtheria,
diminish, in an extraordinary proportion, the duration and intensity of the
disease. There is no other treatment for diphtheria to-day. A doctor is
guilty, and even criminal, if he does not use it, for the therapeutic
results of this treatment are marvellous.
I do not speak of clinical observation only. All those who have seen the
effects of one of these injections of serum on children down with
diphtheria are veritably stupefied at the resurrection which they witness
only a few minutes after the injection. The unfortunate child with his
purple face and convulsed limbs, scarcely breathing, comes back to fresh
life as soon as he has received the beneficent injection of serum. The
facts are so decisively clear that even if we have only seen them once we
can never again forget them. But I shall simply call the attention of my
readers to the following statistics, the result of more than 500,000
observations made in England, in the United States, in France, in Russia,
in Germany, in Italy, in Austria, in fact everywhere: the death-rate in
diphtheria before 1892 (for the serotherapic method took four years to
become known and practised) was 45 per cent. After 1892, this death-rate
fell to 12 per cent.[8] Consequently, out of every hundred patients
suffering from diphtheria, thirty are saved by the serotherapic treatment.
Let us stop for a moment to consider these figures, which seem mere
abstractions to those who have not reflected. At the present time, about
300,000 children per annum in France are attacked by diphtheria; that makes
4,500,000 from 1892 to 1907. The proportion of 30 per cent. is therefore
1,350,000. The number of children who have been saved in France alone by
serotherapy in fifteen years is therefore 1,350,000. Let us put it in round
numbers at one million only; this would be sufficient to justify the death
of the twenty-five dogs and the one hundred rabbits which I sacrificed, and
of the two hundred horses which Behring and Roux used for the preparation
of the anti-diphtheria serum. A million families in mourning, a million
hopes mowed down in the bud! Only fanatics would dare to say this weighs
for nought in the balance.
Moreover--and why should I not say it aloud?--this so-called humanity of
anti-vivisectionists seems to me the antithesis of humanity. To satisfy a
conception which they have forged out of a certain hazy ideal, they make
quick shrift of human life and suffering. A hundred weeping mothers, a
hundred unfortunate children with gaping throats, suffocating, gasping, the
death-rattle at hand--that is what these sensitive souls declare is nothing
beside one rabbit which has had to receive a little blood of a dog into its
abdomen! These philanthropists are creatures of a fixed idea! Let humanity
suffer, weep and die! What does that matter, provided that their fixed
idea, driven right up to the hilt of delirium, triumphs! After all, if they
persist in believing that the faint and uncertain suffering of a sick
rabbit is not worth the certain and excruciating suffering of a thousand
human creatures, I can say but one thing: I pity them from the very bottom
of my heart.
* * * * *
These examples--antisepsis, tuberculosis, and serotherapy--will suffice
perhaps to justify experimental pathology. There is now another
experimental science which I am going to try to justify also. This is
_Therapeutics_.
We are only able to learn the action of medicaments by studying the action
of poisons, for all medicaments in strong doses are poisonous. Now, to
understand a poison thoroughly, we must experiment with it on the animal.
Simpson administered chloroform to men only after Flourens had determined
its anæsthesic properties on animals. Liebreich, after he discovered
chloral, studied its physiological properties on animals, and only after
long and learned studies was he able to give it a place in human
therapeutics. At the present day, chloral is one of the most extensively
used medicines, one which has relieved innumerable patients. When I carried
out my research on chloralose, before studying its effects on myself, I
began by giving it to cats and fowls. I was ignorant of the degree of toxic
power of this new, still unknown substance, and, at the risk of appearing
very pusillanimous, I did not wish to begin on myself; I preferred trying
it on a fowl. Not that I estimate my life very highly, but after all,
however low an estimate I may place on my own life, I think it is worth
more than that of a fowl. Many other medicines have been thus experimented
with on animals before it was possible to ascertain their effects on man.
Kocher discovered cocaine, Knorr antipyrine; and these two admirable
medicines did not find their way into therapeutics until their mode of
action and their toxic power had been ascertained on animals.
In a word, the whole of present-day therapeutics has for foundation, not
only ancient clinical observation, which it would be supremely foolish to
disdain, but also the experiments of modern times, which it would be
equally foolish to proscribe.
Perhaps certain people imagine that there are no therapeutics, and that we
can replace by auto-suggestion, prayer, or hypnotisation, everything which
doctors generally use to cure or allay disease. It is difficult to reply to
such objections, because those who make them have never opened a work of
science nor seen a patient. They see things as they wish to see them. They
imagine that the exterior world is constructed according to their interior
vision, and they do not deign to come into contact with reality. They
believe that enthusiasm can supply the place of instruction, and that a
certain doubtful generosity can replace profound and patient study. They
maintain perhaps that chloral does not make one sleep, that salicylate of
soda does not alleviate rheumatic pains, that bromide of potassium does not
check attacks of epilepsy. Perhaps they will even continue to say so for a
long time to come. Let them talk; progress will be made without them.
_Les chiens aboient et la caravane passe._
FOOTNOTES:
[7] See footnote, p. 17.
[8] These statistics can be found in all technical works; and I refer those
who may be curious to study them in detail to the special memoirs and
excellent treatises on pathology which have been published in England,
France, and Germany.
See also appendix.
CHAPTER V
SERVICES RENDERED TO SCIENCE AND HUMANITY BY EXPERIMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY
I now come to a favourite theme of anti-vivisectionists, viz., that
experimental physiology has produced nothing, and that the differences of
opinion among _savants_ are so considerable that this alone proves the
impossibility of vivisection ever establishing anything permanent.
Here again it is difficult to reply because of the very ignorance of the
honourable gentlemen who criticise us. Most certainly there still remain
many disputed and disputable points in physiology, and nothing is easier
than to find therein striking and abundant contradictions. If we wished to
amuse ourselves, we might write five or six big volumes on the subject; but
let us leave this tedious and useless labour to the anti-vivisectionists to
accomplish to their hearts' content. I prefer to tell them, what they do
not wish to know perhaps, that contradiction is the very essence of
science. As our demonstrations appeal not to faith but to reason; as we
admit free discussion, free investigation from every side; any proposition
must have multitudinous and positive proofs in its favour before it can be
adopted without hesitation. Even our opinions were never prescribed by
faith or violence; we take pleasure in provoking discussion and
contradiction. With our adversaries' leave be it said that a dogmatic,
irreproachable book, where there was no place for hesitation or doubt,
would be the very negation of science. Even the treatises of geometry and
mechanics, although non-experimental, rational sciences, sometimes
contradict themselves. It has been rightly said that the history of science
is the history of human errors--errors which, little by little, draw nearer
and nearer to supreme truth without ever attaining it. We must understand
this, or we shall be rebelling against the conception of scientific truth.
Now, in treatises on physiology, we find a number of well-demonstrated
truths, and a still larger number of truths only half demonstrated, and,
consequently, contested. Our successors will also certainly find in our
books of to-day an enormous number of errors.
What conclusion is to be drawn from this fact? Have those who reproach the
science of physiology with being only a tissue of contradictions and errors
ever opened a book on physiology (for example, the text-book of Schaefer,
in two large, compact, closely written volumes of 1000 pages each)? They
would there find thousands of positive, incontestable facts on all the
questions which concern physiology.
Let us take, each in its turn, the great functions of life, and we shall
see that they have become known only by experimentation.
1. _The Circulation of the Blood_, suspected by Michel Servet, Realdo
Colombo, and Andreas Cesalpin, was really established by Harvey in 1628.
Yet Harvey was only able to demonstrate it by experiments performed on the
living bodies of frogs and deer. Since Harvey's time, the laws of the
circulation have been established with admirable precision. Hales
demonstrated the pressure of blood in the vessels. Chauveau and Marey
introduced into the heart of a horse an apparatus which enabled the
pressure of the blood in the heart, in the arteries, and in the veins, to
be measured. Weber found that the pneumogastric nerve stopped the heart's
action. Ludwig applied the graphic method to the circulation. Delicate
instruments have been constructed which give diagrams of the pulsations and
measure the pressure of the blood in the arteries and in the heart of man.
Claude Bernard discovered the nerves which regulate the movements of the
vessel walls. In short, the whole history of the circulation is due solely
to vivisections, and it would be ridiculous to speak of our uncertainties
in this respect; for the essential mechanical or nervous laws of the
circulation are as well known now as those of the combinations of nitrogen
with oxygen.
2. _The Respiration_ remained profoundly unknown, as to its inmost nature,
right up to Lavoisier's time. Lavoisier placed some guinea-pigs in a box
filled with ice, measured the quantity of heat thrown off, the quantity of
oxygen consumed, the quantity of carbonic acid produced; and he was thus
able to deduce a fundamental law of life, viz., that life is essentially
combustion. He made experiments on himself also; but however great one's
respect for the life of a guinea-pig may be, must it be considered wrong
that Lavoisier should have experimented on the guinea-pig before
experimenting on himself?
As for the laws which regulate this consumption of oxygen and this
production of carbonic acid, to discover these it was necessary to put into
cages animals of every species and of every size. And there is, perhaps,
not a single physiologist who has not made this experiment, at the risk of
annoying the cats and dogs thus exposed--without, as far as that goes,
doing them any harm--to varied temperatures or to different diets.
Moreover, in order to study the respiratory exchanges, physiologists
experiment on man as well; is, therefore, the extraordinary scruple against
experimenting on animals to be imposed upon them also?
To take an excellent example of the services which experimental physiology
can render not to science only--which would, indeed, be quite sufficient
to justify them--but to humanity, I will cite the experiments of Paul Bert
with relation to elevated atmospheric pressures. There are certain workmen
who are obliged to work under water, at a depth of 20 to 30 yards, for the
construction of piers and bridges, or the exploration of sunken vessels.
Now, it had long been observed that some of these men died suddenly on
returning to the surface. Experimental physiology was able to discover the
cause of that sudden death. When a man (or an animal), after having been
subjected to several times the normal atmospheric pressure, is suddenly
released from this pressure, the nitrogen dissolved in the blood is
disengaged suddenly: this produces gaseous embolism, that is to say,
bubbles of gas are formed, which block the blood-vessels and prevent the
blood circulating in the capillaries. Knowing this, the death of men
working at a pressure of four atmospheres could then be avoided by
releasing them slowly, that is by bringing them slowly back to the normal
atmospheric pressure. Is it barbarous to attach more importance to the
death of these men than to the death of the few dogs and mice that served
to establish this law?
I was able to demonstrate that, if the temperature of the air is very high,
as in the hottest days of summer, dogs that are muzzled die rapidly of
hyperpyrexia (_i.e._ high fever), for they are no longer able to cool
themselves by panting. It is true that this experiment cost the lives of a
few dogs, but has it not saved many others by pointing out that dogs should
not be muzzled under certain conditions? It goes without saying I am not
speaking of the theoretical consequences of this experiment.
Artificial respiration, which can restore to life the apparently drowned,
is one, of the conquests of experimental physiology; for we have been able
to determine the best method and the essential conditions (for artificial
breathing) by experiments of a very precise nature. Is it nothing to know
how to restore to life the apparently drowned?
3. _The Process of Digestion_ has also been learned solely by experiment.
In the history of science there are two or three cases of individuals in
whom a wound or an operation has produced a gastric fistula, that is to say
an abdominal opening through which the stomach can be reached and food
introduced. Had we remained satisfied with these accidental observations,
we should have obtained but mediocre results. Physiologists therefore have
made experimental gastric fistulæ. Dogs thus operated on, after an illness
of a few days, recover thoroughly. Some physiologists have kept dogs for
several years in this condition: gay, caressing, docile, they did not
appear to complain of their lot. They were better nourished, more petted
and loved than the many starving dogs which roam about the country. They
were not a whit more unhappy than was Alexis St Martin (observed in 1831 by
Dr Beaumont) and Marcellin (whom I observed in 1878, at the beginning of my
career). Quite recently an eminent Russian physiologist, Pawloff, has, by
making gastric fistulæ in animals, been able to discover a number of
important facts, absolutely necessary to be known for the treatment of
diseases of the stomach, and even for the establishment of a normal
alimentation.
The problem of alimentation is, indeed, one of the most essential, perhaps
the most essential, in the history of humanity. I suppose that
anti-vivisectionists are aware of the fact that, even in Europe, large
populations exist who are insufficiently nourished. Under these conditions,
is it not desirable to know exactly the quantities of carbon, nitrogen,
salt, lime, and phosphorus which are necessary for animals, and
consequently for man? Should not anti-vivisectionists, interested in
vegetarianism, before venturing to institute a vegetable diet for man, try
it first of all upon carnivorous animals, so as to know how a mixed
alimentation can be modified by a vegetable alimentation, and to what
extent those modifications are compatible with health?
4. _The Nervous System_ is not so well known, so far as its functions are
concerned, as the circulatory system or the digestive system. Nevertheless,
positive discoveries are extremely numerous: the action of the nerves on
the glands and on the muscles; the part played by the different portions
of the brain; nervous degenerations; the laws governing reflex actions--all
this constitutes a formidable body of well-established facts. I do not
pretend that everything is known. Alas! No! There are still innumerable
truths to be discovered, and serious errors are doubtless most learnedly
taught, with many contradictions, much uncertainty, much confusion--all of
which simply proves that physiology is not a science whose last chapter has
yet been written, that the last word of this science has not yet been
pronounced. Nevertheless, blind indeed would the man be who would venture
to conclude that physiology was not a science; or to assert that physiology
is a science of little importance; that the rôle of the physiologist, from
the point of view of the alleviation of human miseries, is null; and that
knowledge of physiological facts is useless. Will it be claimed that the
doctor has no need of a knowledge of physiology? I will reply by a
comparison I am accustomed to make before my medical students when I wish
to make them understand the necessity of a sound physiological education.
Let us suppose that a watchmaker claimed to be able to cure disordered
watches, but at the same time declared himself unable to tell by what
springs and by what mysterious mechanism a healthy watch should mark the
hour; that watchmaker would inspire me with a very small amount of
confidence, and I would not go to him; for, until the contrary is proved to
me, I believe that an indispensable condition for repairing a watch when
out of order is to know how a watch should work when in good repair.
Physiology exists only because there have been physiologists. By that I do
not mean to say that all the truths of physiology are due exclusively to
vivisection. I only claim that physiology without vivisection would be
strangely clumsy, limited to a few empirical facts, and that, if
vivisection be proscribed, we must resolutely give up classing physiology
among the sciences. We may study the stars and the earth, electricity and
heat, geography and history, and are we to be forbidden to study the
functions of living matter? Such a proposal is obviously absurd, for of all
the sciences accessible to man, physiology is that which is nearest to
him.
It is only the ignorant who dare assert that experimentation on animals
cannot be applied to man. There are of course differences which
physiologists train themselves to perceive; for example, certain poisons
are almost innocuous to some animals, and are very fatal to man. The
alkaloid of belladonna, atropine, is a thousand times more toxic for a man
than for a goat. It is difficult to kill a goat with morphia, whilst a drop
of laudanum kills a new-born babe. Carbonic oxide is absolutely harmless
for the invertebrata which have no blood. Crayfish and snails live with
impunity in pure oxide of carbon. And I could cite a number of other facts
which are described in detail in every treatise of physiology or
pharmacology.
But what does it matter to us if we know it?--and we can nearly always know
it. There are functional differences between men and animals; and
physiologists know these perfectly well by their training; but there are,
above all things, much more striking resemblances. It would be, for
instance, ridiculous to suppose that oxygen did not dissolve in our blood
in about the same way in which it dissolves in the blood of a cat or a
rabbit; that the pneumogastric nerve, which stops the heart of the cat and
the rabbit, will not stop the heart of man; that the arterial pressure,
which is 16 c.m. of mercury in the horse, the dog, and the cat, is 1 c.m.
or 1.60 c.m. in man; that the transformation of albuminous matters into
urea takes place differently in the dog and in man. On the contrary,
everything goes to prove the general laws are the same, and that the
physiology of man, whilst not rigorously identical in every respect with
the physiology of the animal, is nevertheless sufficiently analogous to
enable a _general physiology_ to comprise in its vast laws the functions of
every living being, man, mammal, vertebrata, invertebrata, and even every
living cell.
CHAPTER VI
MORALITY AND VIVISECTION
If we took the assertions of anti-vivisectionists literally, we should
arrive at the strange conclusion, that the victims of vivisection are
immensely numerous, and that vivisection is one of the calamities of the
century. As a matter of fact, the number of victims due to physiology is
very low. Let us try to count them up.
There are only about twenty laboratories in France where experiments on
animals are made. Let us allow that there are twenty in England, twenty in
Italy, forty in Germany, and fifty in other countries, making a total of
150 laboratories. If we suppose that a dog, a cat, and a rabbit are
sacrificed every day in each of these laboratories, we should certainly
exaggerate.
Let us suppose, nevertheless, that it is so; and let us even admit five
victims a day, with 300 working days in the year, which is also an evident
exaggeration: this will make about 200,000 victims a year. This number,
which seems very considerable, is in reality very small, if we put it
against the enormous number of living beings. Probably about two thousand
millions of mammals die every year, so that the proportion of animals that
suffer a little (and very little) through the act of man in his search for
knowledge is one in 10,000, in other words, a negligible quantity.
In the immense earthly universe are thousands and thousands of pains, of
fierce, incessant struggles between living animals. Every rock in the
ocean, every tree in the forest, shelters ferocious combats, and is the
constant scene of painful death-agonies. Darwin has admirably shown that
life is a struggle for life, that the weak are crushed by the strong, and
that the voice of living nature is a cry of distress rather than a hymn of
joy. Therefore, in this universal concert of animal pain and of human pain,
the slight pain of animals experimented upon is a little thing, and from
an absolute point of view we have the right to disregard it.
Think well over it all for a moment. By giving an experimental disease to a
rabbit, for example, I scarcely change its lot. If I had left it to itself,
in one, two, or perhaps three years it would have been attacked by another
disease, probably more cruel than the tuberculosis with which I infected
it. The lot of dogs which die of old age is scarcely enviable. How many
poor old dogs have I seen, impotent from rheumatism, completely blind, no
longer able to crawl about, covered with disgusting ulcers, seeming to beg
for the finishing stroke which would put an end to their misery! And old,
worn-out horses! What a spectacle! This residuum of existence of old
animals is truly pitiable, and, taking everything into consideration, it is
not an enormous dose of happiness we have left them in not sacrificing them
when they were young.
But I shall not dwell upon this argument, for it might also be applied to
human beings. The Greeks said: "Happy are they who die young, for they are
beloved of the gods." Perhaps some day human ethics will allow us to spare
our dear ones the cruel and useless sufferings of old age! I know not. But
what I do know is that it is not inhuman to sacrifice an old horse or an
old dog in order to save it from going through all the tortures which old
age and disease hold in reserve for him.
In any case, the sufferings produced by physiologists who inoculate
diseases into animals weigh very little in comparison with natural
suffering, not only because the suffering of animals is always more or less
immersed in the nihilism of semi-consciousness, but also because these
experimental sufferings are less than natural sufferings, and extend over a
very small number of victims.
_But the question does not lie there._ The point is not whether the
suffering of animals be a large or small quantity in nature from an
absolute standpoint; the question is a higher one: we must ask ourselves if
the fact of inflicting pain is compatible with human morality.
Tolstoi says somewhere that the sciences are nothing, that art is nothing,
that the true science is that of good and evil, of justice and injustice.
Everything sinks into insignificance in presence of this great duty, or
rather life has no other object. We should be entirely engrossed in doing
good; justice should be our sole preoccupation.
If, then, from an absolute point of view the suffering of frogs and rabbits
does not count, it counts a lot from the point of view of human morality.
If a bad child should martyrise a toad, it is not the toad which would
interest me: poor creature of diffused consciousness, ignorant even of its
own pain, such a tiny pain, too, in comparison with the immense pains which
the beings of this great universe are suffering at this moment! No; the
toad would scarcely exist for me. The child would interest me greatly; and
all my pity would be turned upon that cruel child. My efforts would tend
much less towards preventing the toad from suffering than towards
preventing that human being from becoming a barbarian.
If the anti-vivisectionists were true moralists and not fanatics they would
say: "To provoke suffering to produce disease, to inflict tortures, is an
execrable moral lesson. Whilst the first duty of man is to be good, you
instruct young men to be wicked. The doctor, who ought to be compassionate
for human suffering, should not serve his apprenticeship in that noble
profession by showing himself devoid of pity for the suffering of innocent
victims. A civilisation which allows itself to inflict death and torture on
living beings can be only a barbarous civilisation."
I recognise the force of that argument. And whilst not a single one of the
preceding assertions of the anti-vivisectionists had succeeded in moving
me, I confess that this objection of human morality is a most powerful one.
I am nevertheless going to try to show that it is not admissible.
And first of all, because there is in this world much suffering, human
suffering, which it is more important to allay than that of the victims of
vivisection. If our sole care were that of morality, what battles would we
not have to fight! There are thousands of people in India who die of
hunger; and throughout Asia whole populations perish of disease which a
little hygiene could prevent. The hunger-evil is rife in Russia; most of
the peasants in Sicily also never know what it is to satisfy their hunger.
The misery of children is lamentable everywhere: in our large cities,
Paris, Berlin, London, it is not exceptional, alas! to come across people
dying of hunger. The terribly high rate of mortality among children less
than a year old is due to hunger and to hunger alone. In Europe two million
children, under one year of age, die every year solely because their
parents are plunged in misery, because the mother, instead of nursing her
child, is forced to work, to earn her living at manual labour, which dries
up her milk. _These two million children who die of hunger are the disgrace
of our civilisation._ And yet we continue to live in luxury, we look on
calmly and indifferently at the agony of our human brothers, an agony which
we could easily alleviate. For my part, willingly shall I allow myself to
be melted with pity at the sight of tuberculous rabbits when I see those
persons who champion these same rabbits, develop within themselves some
pity for human suffering, a pity grown so deep, so powerful, that they
devote their entire fortune towards rescuing their brethren from death
through hunger.
There is not only famine and want. There are many other social scourges;
and these scourges are much more serious than vivisection can ever become.
There is alcoholism, prostitution, war. And I have no need to say that
alcoholism is an evil, that prostitution is an evil, that war is an evil.
When human morality has been developed to such a pitch that man will no
longer be able to look on these great social miseries without horror, it
will be time enough perhaps to ask if it be permissible to seek for truth
at the expense of a little animal suffering. But until then I have the
right to stigmatise as hypocrisy all that immense pity which certain people
profess for dogs, side by side with their immense heedlessness, which they
do not fear to display, towards the fate of so many unfortunate human
beings.
If anti-vivisectionists were animated by a great desire for morality, they
would endeavour to reform our social condition, which is abominable and
full of horrors; they would strive to impart into youth other notions than
that of smug satisfaction with the present social conditions. As long as we
have not faced the profound evils which gnaw at the root of our social
system, as long as we take a delight in the egotistical satisfaction of our
capitalist and martial society, it is not permissible, if we would not be
accused of scandalous hypocrisy, to affect pretensions to morality.
Even from the very exclusive and rather paltry point of view of animals'
rights, are there not among anti-vivisectionists those of social position
who make no scruple in amusing themselves by fishing and hunting? In this
case they kill, they martyrise, not to conquer new truths, but for their
amusement and recreation.
The hunter who fires at a hare sends after the wounded animal a savage dog,
trained to fierceness for this pursuit, and he looks on at the chase with
delight. The angler who has hooked a fish feels a pleasurable emotion when
he holds in the palm of his hand the struggling, writhing being. Elegant
sportsmen aim at pigeons to give proofs of their dexterity. A large number
of victims do not die on the spot, but, with wounded wing, or chest
pierced with lead, creep away to die in agony in the neighbouring woods.
Quite a large gathering of fashionable young women and distinguished young
men follow on horseback the tortures of a wretched stag pursued by a
furious pack of hounds. And, finally, the entire population of a large city
(Seville or Madrid, San Sebastian or Valencia), men and women, old and
young, go crazy with delight at the hideous spectacle of a noble bull
disembowelling horses, tormented by the picadors, and finally succumbing,
exhausted, done to death by his cowardly enemies. There are sights for you!
there are amusements for you if you like, which reflect scant honour on
human ethics; and well do I understand generous-hearted men and women
forming societies to combat war, alcoholism, prostitution, distributing
their wealth among the starving populations, also turning their energies
against hunting, angling, pigeon-shooting, and bullfights. It is a noble
programme of life which they have drawn up for themselves, and such people
merit our highest admiration.
Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals are admirable and
irreproachable when they defend animals against human savagery: for
example, when they prevent carters from lashing into ribbons the skin of
the miserable horses under their charge; or when they put down the practice
of harnessing a horse to a cart too heavily loaded; or when they interdict
cock-fighting and bull-baiting. I will even point out to these same
societies, so enamoured of animals' rights, a new kind of protection of
quite a special nature.
There exist a number of species of animals which, hunted and hemmed in by
man, are on the point of extinction. How many, alas! have for ever
disappeared; and no human power will ever be able to bring back to life an
animal species once extinct.
It is a great pity; for these charming forms, the joy of the eyes, provided
with curious and delicate instincts, have been annihilated for ever. I will
give some examples to show to what an extent it is necessary for man to
protect the animal against man himself. Man has the taste for devastation;
and when he is excited, either by the fury of the hunt or the bait of gain,
he does not hesitate to make many victims without asking himself if these
furious ravages will not find their consummation in the destruction of an
entire race of animals.
Already in the Polar regions, some fine species of animals have
disappeared. The great auk (extinct since 1844) exists no longer. One
species of walrus has also disappeared.
The seal is on the road to extinction; fishermen have indulged in such
orgies of destruction that international measures have had to be taken to
prevent the total destruction of the species. And indeed be it not
forgotten that if the Governments of England and of the United States have
made regulations restricting the massacre of seals, it is not by any means
in order to stem the tide of destruction of an animal species interesting
in itself, but solely because such destruction would put an end to a source
of very considerable commercial profit.
A hundred years ago, whales were so abundant that 30,000 fishermen earned
their living by whale-hunting. Now, our means of warfare against the
cetacea have become so effective that whales can no longer defend
themselves, and their number is decreasing every day to such an extent that
we can almost foretell the moment when the whale will have ceased to exist.
In America, vast regions were overrun by immense herds of bisons. They have
been massacred with such mad and blind ardour that if the Government had
not finally taken some tardy and insufficient measures of precaution, the
bison would be extinct too.
Aurochs, elks, chamois, bears have almost disappeared, whereas a century
ago they were widely diffused in Europe. In proportion as man takes
possession of the earth to cultivate it, he kills off every wild species
and replaces them by domestic species where race loses its value. If this
goes on, a time will come, unfortunately, when all-powerful man, having
given himself up to the thoughtless destruction of everything not of
immediate use to him, will have wiped off the face of the earth all save
domestic animals. There will be hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, and
guinea-fowls, sheep, oxen, donkeys, horses, cows. Perhaps for the pleasure
of hunting, a few deer and a few hares will be preserved; but all wild
species which cannot be reproduced in captivity will have disappeared, will
no longer be there to delight our gaze. In France, the small birds are
destroyed in rank fury, and every measure taken to protect them is
inefficacious, thanks to the rage for destruction among the inhabitants.
Asia and Africa once upon a time--when almost unknown and unexplored by
Europeans--sheltered many a noble animal species to-day well-nigh extinct,
and which, if strict measures of precaution be not speedily taken, will
soon have disappeared for ever. The large monkeys, the ostrich, the
giraffe, and especially the elephant, shun the haunts of man, for man is
their ruthless enemy. It looks as though a hundred years hence, not one
will be left.
It is not without sadness we think of that future civilisation, a brilliant
one perhaps from several points of view, but monotonous and tame, as it
will no longer possess this marvellous variety of different animal species
which is as one of the smiles of nature. A pitiable uniformity will replace
the varied forms which natural selection has taken thousands of years to
bring forth; and then perhaps some tardy poet, in contemplation before the
vast sheepfolds and poultry farms, where man will cultivate the species of
use to him, will regret those far-off days when birds of all kinds sang in
the forests, blending their gambols with those of the graceful animals
which human civilisation will have annihilated.
There, I fancy, is a fertile subject for meditation, and interesting
initiative for all those who have at heart the rights of animals, and, if I
may express myself thus, the future of animality.
But the sight of a vivisection, the preparation of a laboratory experiment
cannot be compared with the stupid and mischievous pleasures of angling and
hunting. It is not a question of amusing oneself, of killing time, of
diversion, of finding in the sight of blood or pain a recreation for
boredom. It is quite another motive which animates the _savant_. He has
ever before his mind the thought that his efforts are going to bring a
little alleviation to the great sum of human suffering. If he inoculates a
rabbit with tuberculosis, he cannot help thinking of all the wretched
consumptives who are at that moment in the throes of death. He knows well
that each time he discovers even only a particle of truth, that little bit
of new truth is going to bring in its train some consequence which will
bear fruit in the healing of suffering mankind.
It is with no light-heartedness that the physiologist causes the blood to
flow, inoculates disease, injects poisons. I know the thought which
animates my friends and my colleagues when they make their experiments: it
is never without the most profound pity that we dare to take a healthy,
gay, confiding animal, and give him chloroform, or inject a poison into
him. This respect for pain, far from decreasing with age, on the contrary
goes on increasing. Just as the doctor as he grows older becomes more and
more sensitive to the sight of human suffering, so the physiologist who has
performed many experiments understands more and more thoroughly the
seriousness of pain. He feels all the weight of it: he has a greater
responsibility. His morality has become higher and higher, his sensibility
has increased. Often he repeats to himself this line of Virgil's:--
"_Non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco._"
(Knowing misfortune, I teach the succour of the wretched.)
It would, therefore, be altogether unjust to reproach the experimenter with
barbarism or inhumanity; for more than any one else does he possess the
sentiment of the immense misfortunes of humanity, and if he resigns himself
to experimentation, it is because he sees behind his experiment an
alleviation of the sufferings of both man and beast.
It is related that, in one of the great battles of the last century, a
general, in order to protect the retreat of his army, was obliged to send a
squadron of cavalry to make a hopeless charge upon the enemy's infantry.
This meant sending those brave fellows to certain death. Yet he did not
hesitate; and with tears in his eyes he gave the order to charge,
convinced, as every general should be, that it is sometimes necessary to
sacrifice a few human lives for the salvation of the army, for the
salvation of the country.
Well, then! We consider ourselves as soldiers waging battle against the
blind, malefic forces of nature. On certain days, so as to triumph over
disease and ignorance, we must sacrifice a few victims. Then we do not
hesitate, and it is our duty not to hesitate.
It even seems to me that those men who pass their lives in nauseous rooms,
amidst poison and virus, receiving no other recompense for long labours
than the satisfaction of duty accomplished, merit the esteem and respect of
every one. They seek neither wealth nor honours. It is not in the
laboratories of physiology that a man grows rich. It is not in the
laboratories of physiology that man wins high social positions. But what
matter! He has used his life to alleviate the sufferings of others. He has
had ever before him another ideal than that of the anti-vivisectionists,
the ideal of human suffering, which is much more to be respected than
animal suffering in spite of all empty words and phrases.
Therefore, when we speak of vivisection or of experimentation before young
men, we must not be taxed with immorality; because work, the search for
truth, pity for the misfortunes of man, pity also for the unfortunate
animals--these I think are subjects which should ennoble the minds of the
young men who listen to us.
CHAPTER VII
ARE LAWS REGULATING VIVISECTION NECESSARY?
We will now briefly consider an interesting and highly practical side of
the question. In certain countries, as in England, there are laws
regulating vivisection. In other countries, as in France, Germany, and
Italy, there is nothing analogous; consequently public opinion on this
point is uncertain.
In the beginning of this book, I acknowledged that, in spite of the
exaggeration of their complaints, anti-vivisectionists had rendered real
service to general morality by calling attention to the excesses committed
by a few vivisectionists in the past. No one recognises this benefit more
than I, and I willingly grant that their preaching has, on the whole, had a
happy result. Is it however, expedient to go further, and to prohibit or
simply to regulate vivisection?
For reasons given above, it seems to me that prohibition would be absurd
and injurious, as well in the land of Harvey and Hunter as in the lands of
Bernard and Pasteur, of Galvani and Spallanzani, of Johannes Müller and
Helmholtz. Prohibition would mean closing the book of science, stemming all
progress, condemning humanity eternally to the same miseries, to writhe,
powerless, in the same old track. Fortunately, no one thinks seriously of
suppressing physiological experimentation; and, therefore, we have no need
to dwell on this point.
But regulation is quite a different thing from prohibition. Now, I showed
that certain practices should be condemned. Should they, however, be
condemned by law? Why should the law be substituted for the exigencies of
science? Here is a physiologist, fully conscious of the magnitude of his
task, to whom the government or a university has confided the direction of
a laboratory, who finds himself face to face with a problem needing to be
solved. It is impossible to limit his efforts and to lay down principles
from which he could not turn aside. Just as he is referred to for the
purchase of his instruments and the nomination of his staff, so must he be
left full latitude in the arrangement of his experiments. Nothing is so
pernicious in matters of science as official regulation; it takes away all
initiative, and does not allow the genius of the inventor to have full
play.
As a matter of fact, even in England, the only country where up to the
present the conditions of vivisection have been regulated by law, no one
has ventured to confine the initiative of the experimenter within narrow
regulations. And it is fortunate that no one has ventured to define the
limits of experimental investigation, for most excellent work is due to
contemporary English Physiologists--Schäfer, Horsley, Sherrington, Langley,
Bayliss, Starling, Stirling, etc. They have been able to pursue their
researches freely, to the very great advantage of our science.
One should not, then, think of prohibiting such or such a proceeding in
vivisection. It may even be dangerous to absolutely prohibit vivisections
without anæsthesia. I make no mystery of my opinion on this point, since I
have distinctly declared further back that no sensitive animal should ever
be operated upon. I regard as a moral error all vivisection made on an
animal capable of suffering. But I would leave the physiologist to be the
judge in the matter. I do not believe the law should take his place; for
perhaps cases will occur where anæsthesia is impossible, and he cannot be
placed under the hard alternative of not making an experiment which his
conscience as a _savant_ judges to be useful, or of disobeying the law.
Moreover, how are the many possible conditions of an experiment to be
precisely laid down? Is the law to indicate the kind of anæsthetic to be
used, and the degree of anæsthesia to be attained? Is it to prohibit all
experiments on toxic actions? Many insoluble difficulties would be
encountered, the sole result of which would be to paralyse the _savant_ in
his researches or to cause him to break the laws of his country.
And yet I recognise that regulation is indispensable, but it ought not to
bear on the nature of the experiment; it should deal solely with the
person experimenting.
I believe the right of practising vivisection should not be accorded to
every citizen, to every medical student; it should not be permissible for
any chance person to take a dog, to fasten him down on the operating table,
and to experiment on the brain, the glands, the muscles of that unfortunate
animal, for that chance person is, in all probability, a clumsy and
ignorant man. Vivisection may not be undertaken in a light-hearted fashion.
After all, science would lose nothing if such an experiment were not made,
and I see no advantage in encouraging attempts of this sort which are
condemned beforehand to be fruitless.
But in a laboratory of physiology, under the direction of the professor and
his assistants, under their moral responsibility, vivisection should not be
prohibited; the number of vivisections should not be limited, and no
restrictions ought to be imposed.
As I have no intention of formulating or drawing up regulations or enacting
laws, I shall not indicate the penalties to which those who violate the
law should be liable. I shall content myself with enunciating this double
principle: entire liberty in vivisection for professors of physiology and
their assistants; prohibition of vivisection for all others.
CHAPTER VIII
VIVISECTION AND THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
Let us now leave the opinions of anti-vivisectionists, and carry the
problem on to higher ground. Let us see what are the rights of man in
Nature, and what is the purpose of human life.
Amidst all the unsettled and contradictory theories accumulated by
philosophers, thinkers and founders of religion, there remains scarcely any
fixed and immutable theory save that of one dominating principle: The
respect and love of our brothers in humanity. All else is contestable and
contested. Though we are unable to demonstrate it formally, there is one
universal moral law (the great Categorical Imperative of Kant) which
commands us to be just and beneficent to our fellow-creatures. All the most
subtle sophisms will never be able to persuade me that I ought not, above
all things, to feel solicitude for the lives and happiness of men.
I willingly admit that beside man there is the animal, _our inferior
brother_ as it has been ingeniously called, so that we have also our duties
towards these inferior brothers. But _this must never be to the detriment
of our real brothers_. It seems to me insane to consider the life of a cat
of more account than that of a man; the pain of a dog than that of a child.
All the more so because living matter, if I may use that expression,
possesses varying degrees of perfection; from the sea-weed up to man there
are successive stages of living forms which constitute an uninterrupted
chain ending in its final phase, which is man.
Man, by his power of thought, and consequently of suffering, by the
conception which he is able to make of the non-self, by his faculties of
abstraction and the notion of good and evil, is vastly superior to every
other living being. So that, for respecting, defending and loving men, I
have not only the reason that man is my brother, but also that this brother
is superior to every other living thing.
That is why a moral code must be essentially human, having for its highest
object the happiness of other men. Every other code of morals, having in
view a different purpose supporting itself on metaphysical lucubrations or
haunted by puerile anxieties, such as the adoration of beasts, appears to
me to bear the stamp of fetishism. An unknown power has caused us to be
born; we are entirely ignorant of our destinies, we know not why we were
born, why we die, why, following in the wake of countless generations, we
transmit the vital spark to countless succeeding generations. We know
nothing of all that; but it matters little from the point of view of our
duty. Duty is independent of all theory. No mere religion is necessary to
constitute a moral code.
_Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto_, or rather our moral code, will
be the religion of humanity. It does not seem to me possible to conceive of
any other.
And when we say humanity, we take that word in its largest acceptation. It
is not a question of compatriots, nor of Europeans, nor even of humanity of
to-day. It is also a question of the humanity of the future. We have our
duties towards the man of to-day; but we have also our duties towards the
man who will live in the centuries to come. We should prepare the way for a
happier and better humanity. Our task is not limited to the present hour;
it extends to all those human beings who will come after us. Inasmuch as we
of to-day, at every moment of our lives, benefit from the accumulated
services of our ancestors, so the men to come will profit by the benefits
which we are endeavouring to prepare for them.
Assuredly, Humanity will not be eternal, and Science seems to prove that a
time will come when the sun's heat will be insufficient to develop life on
the surface of our puny planet. A time will come when the earth will have
cooled down and become like our pale satellite, the moon, a dead star,
where the debris of extinct multitudinous civilisations will disappear
under the ice. But what matter! We have not to trouble ourselves about
those far-off times. We have to think of the man of the coming centuries,
and, at the same time, it goes without saying, of the man of to-day.
To lessen their misery, to make their existence less lamentable, to develop
within them the sentiments of justice and brotherhood, to secure their
moral welfare and their material welfare, that is our strict and sole duty.
I recognise no other.
Now, there is but one way open to attain this noble goal: Science. We are
plunged in an ocean of gloom. All is dark, unknown, disturbing. We have not
yet understood anything of the blind forces surrounding us on all sides. We
are but feeble beings cast into the midst of sovereign powers which
overwhelm and bear us down. Now, to avoid being completely and definitely
crushed out of existence, it is necessary to penetrate into the nature of
these forces. Alas! we shall never penetrate into them, for it is madness
to think that a particle of the whole can ever fully cognise the whole; but
we may at least demonstrate some facts, fathom some phenomena, perhaps
trace a few of the features of certain laws. That is enough to make us
instantly the masters of matter and not its slaves.
Every new truth at once brings about an amelioration in human conditions.
It may be said that our _happiness is made up of truth_. Let us suppose
what is improbable, that is to say, that we have come to know all the laws
of Nature, should we not immediately become all-powerful? Should we not be
the sovereign masters of disease and pain, perhaps of old age and death?
Such, indeed, appears to be the conviction of the human societies which
assign a preponderating rôle to Science. They have understood that there is
no better future in store for the human being than that which Science will
bring about for him.
To be able to appreciate the extent to which the man of to-day is
materially and morally happier than the man of past ages, we have only to
compare the present state of our civilisation with the state of past
civilisations. We may say that an English labourer of to-day has a much
easier existence than had an Italian prince of the fourteenth century.
Everywhere, the progress achieved by Science has entered into the life of
each individual. We find it in the book we read, in the electricity which
gives us light, in the train or the steamer which carries us to the
uttermost corners of the earth in little time and at little cost. It is the
same thing also with medicaments, which are certainly able to lessen the
pain of disease.
Moral progress has kept pace with material progress. At the same time that
matter has been overcome, our customs have become gentler; individual
liberty is a sacred thing; each citizen takes part in the decisions of his
government; there is no longer either slavery or torture or tyranny of
conscience. In a word, the man of to-day is happier and more powerful than
the man of bygone days.
This happiness has not been acquired through any providential "miracles."
No God came down from His Heaven to alleviate human misfortunes. It is man,
and man alone, who, by his genius and his labours, has been able to make
himself master of the forces which, even yesterday, held him in bondage.
And we cannot be too grateful to our fathers for their immense and fruitful
labours, by which they succeeded in constructing the society in the midst
of which we live. It is still wretched enough, this society of ours,
afflicted with crimes and horrors, the infamy of which we understand full
well; but however wretched it may be, it is a thousand times less wretched
than was society of yore.
Therefore, this formal conclusion may at once be deduced; we must do for
our descendants what our fathers did for us. We would be without excuse if
we rested content to benefit from the works of our predecessors without
ourselves also creating something, without leaving, by means of our
personal labours, a better lot to our descendants. The man who has not
understood this supreme duty is truly unworthy of being a man.
Verily, every individual, when he has arrived at the end of his life,
should examine his conscience and ask himself if in the humble sphere of
his action, he has not, even he also, contributed a stone to the human
edifice, if he has not done his share in promoting and increasing the
forces of humanity.
Since matters stand thus, since the development of Science is the
fundamental condition of the happiness of man, we must resolutely put
Science at the basis of every civilisation. Alas! it has not been so up to
the present; and if we study the development of human societies, we see
that they are above all things attracted to war. Science has had only the
leavings. But the time has come when man should no longer believe that the
principle of morality is man's struggle against man. That was the history
of bye-gone times. The history of to-day, and especially the history of
to-morrow, is the struggle of man against matter, the subjection of natural
forces to our intelligence. And there is no other way to subjugate these
forces than by learning to know them.
Then Science will be put in the foreground. And without making any
classification which distinguishes between the sciences, which are all
useful, beautiful, and noble, for all contain a portion of truth, we shall
be permitted to say that the Science of life is one of the most useful, the
most noble, and the most beautiful.
Now, the Science of life is Physiology, taking physiology in its widest
sense, that is to say, the study of normal beings and of diseased beings.
It is proved by innumerable facts, facts which only bad faith and ignorance
can call into question, that our physiological knowledge is due, in a very
large measure, to experimentation. If in thought we suppressed the
scientific results which experimentation has conquered, we should have but
an inferior science, within the reach of the Brahmans may be, but unworthy
of our present scientific standing. We should know nothing of the
circulation of the blood, nor the function of the blood corpuscles, nor the
formation of sugar, nor the innervation of the glands, nor the
contagiousness of disease, nor the power of poisons; we should be reduced
to the notions of Hippocrates, we should be less advanced than Galileo, the
first ingenious experimenter who indicated, less by his writings than by
his experiments, that the basis of physiology, and consequently of the
whole of pathology, is experimentation on animals.
Those most sincere persons who wish to banish experimentation from Science
are consequently, I do not fear to say it, standing in the position of
direct contradiction to true morality. To refuse man the right to study
living nature, is as though we declared that living nature ought not to be
known. Alas! anti-vivisectionists will not listen. In vain do we tell them
that we, physiologists, preserve man from disease; that we have alleviated
the ills of our human brothers. They stop up their ears; they shut their
eyes; they have no pity for the sufferings of human beings. It seems as
though the tears of their brethren were profoundly indifferent to them. Is
this a high morality? Is this a realisation of their duty as men? They
cover with opprobrium the names of Harvey and Jenner, Bernard and Pasteur,
Spallanzani and Helmholtz. What base ingratitude! It is these great men who
have turned aside many excruciating sufferings from humanity; it is these
grand men who have bestowed a better lot on so many human beings. When,
therefore, they dare to calumniate the masters who have scattered over us
so much beneficence, anti-vivisectionists seem to me to be not only the
most ungrateful but even the cruellest of men.
Fortunately the conquering march of Science will not be hindered. We shall
never return to those sinister times when our great Vesalius had to forfeit
his life for having dared to dissect a human corpse. We shall continue to
make Science advance towards its great aim, the good of man.
And this is the moment which has been chosen for striving to arrest the
march of Science: when epidemic disease, such as the plague and cholera, is
checked; tuberculosis half-conquered; diptheria rendered inoffensive;
operations become almost harmless; cancer on the eve of being understood
and subjugated! And are we to stop there? Are we not to seek to fathom the
many problems still waiting to be solved, and on which depend the lives of
so many human beings, and so much human happiness? Do you believe that
Science has come to an end? Certainly we already know a great deal; but
what we know is as nothing compared to what we do not know.
An immense domain of unknown truths lies open to our activity. And we are
able to forsee what inexpressible benefits these new truths will scatter
over suffering humanity. Consequently, everyone, every man enamoured of
goodness and justice, should be filled with respect for Science, and set
all his hopes on her.
At the same time, however great may be my adoration for Science, it must
not be at the expense of human personalities, or, let us say it distinctly,
at the expense of animal personalities, which although uncertain and
indistinct, still merit a share, and a large share, of justice and of pity.
As for human personalities, without the slightest doubt, we have not the
right to sacrifice an innocent creature for Science. Every human being
ought to be treated with respect, and we have not the right to kill and
martyrise a human being even if his death and his martyrdom might serve the
cause of Science.
As for animal personalities, the question becomes much more doubtful. For
inferior beings with indistinct consciousness, and, without a doubt
powerless to perceive pain, no scruple should hold us back. But if it
concerns beings nearer to ourselves, such as monkeys, cats, dogs, horses,
all certainly capable of feeling pain, we must be chary of inflicting pain,
and experiment only after having totally abolished in them all sensation of
pain. But under penalty of falling into fetishism, we must not fear to use
the life of these beings in order to prolong the life of man. Every time we
propose to make an experiment, it is as though we put this question to
ourselves: is this dog worth more than a man? or than a hundred men? or
than the whole of humanity to come? Thus put, the problem bears only one
solution: Avoid giving pain to the animal on condition that it is not at
the cost of innumerable human pains. Moreover, it is the same here as in
every question we may wish to investigate: Each of the two adversaries set
out from a just principle, incontestably just. But each one pushes the just
principle so far that he ends by transforming it into a colossal absurdity.
In the present case, the anti-vivisectionists say: pain is an evil, even
the obscure pain of the lowest animal is an evil. Now, we should do no
evil; therefore we should not at any price inflict any pain whatsoever,
however light it may be, on even the lowest animal. That is their
syllogism. It cannot be replied to, for it is perfectly correct.
We on our side say: The suffering of man is a sacred thing. Science casts
aside suffering from man. Therefore we ought to sacrifice inferior beings
to the cause of Science, that is to say to the happiness of man. There
again lies an irreproachable syllogism.
But these two syllogisms, if driven up to their ultimate conclusions, would
lead to nonsense on the one hand and cruelty on the other. If we were to
listen only to the friends of animals, we should not have the right to
bleed a horse in order to save the lives of 400 children; and this
contention would be both foolish and cruel.
If we were to listen only to the friends of man, we should have the right,
simply as dictated by our might and fancy, to cause suffering to dogs,
cats, monkeys, all innocent and sensitive animals, under pretext that these
tortures are capable of alleviating human pain. That also would be folly
and cruelty.
Fortunately, wisdom avoids both extremes; it fears the brutality of hard
and fast syllogisms, which are absurd even by their very severity. Yes,
there are the rights of man; yes, there are the rights of animals; and all
our efforts should consist in holding an even balance between these two
sometimes antagonistic rights. Do not let us push our reasonings to their
logical but absurd extremes. Pre-occupation for the welfare of future
humanity and of Science does not authorise us to be wicked and unjust
towards the men of to-day, even towards one single man. So that,
notwithstanding my worship of Science, I would not sacrifice human lives to
her. And, notwithstanding all my respect for animal pain, I would look upon
the man as supremely ridiculous, even guilty, who would not innoculate a
microbe into a rabbit to achieve a great discovery for humanity. Wisdom,
therefore, consists precisely in this: to know where to stop in pushing a
reasoning to extremes. This is what physiologists have sought and are
seeking to do.
In any case, and as a last conclusion, Science ought not to be sacrificed.
Now, the death-knell of science will have sounded when _savants_ are
prevented from pursuing their investigations on living beings. We who, in
full confidence, hope for a happier and better humanity, will never resign
ourselves to closing our laboratories, to burning our books. On the
contrary, we are determined, every one of us, to continue our hard labours
for the great good of the men of to-day and of the generations to come.
And when we speak of Science, we do not mean only the material benefits she
scatters abroad; we think also of her power as a moral force. Material and
moral conquests walk hand in hand. Science is the basis of the moral law.
The universal consciousness of humanity grows greater by the acquisition of
new truths. Each individual, by the very fact that he loves truth, has come
to understand the moral ideal which should be ever before his eyes.
And then, in a just measure, full of pity for all suffering, but placing
the suffering of man at a higher price than the suffering of the animal, we
shall strive to make the respect of animal suffering accord with the search
for the splendid and indispensable and divine TRUTH.
POST SCRIPTUM
In the various works, notices, discourses, etc., which have been published
upon Vivisection, generally against Vivisection, I find various erroneous
assertions which it is important should be pointed out. I will do so
briefly.
There is, however, one assertion which appears fairly just to me. This is
that in treatises on physiology, sufficient mention is not made of
Vivisection, of its limits and of its abuses. At the beginning of a
treatise on physiology, the author should distinctly declare there is
always cruelty in vivisection conducted without chloroform or chloralose;
the author should indicate that these anæsthetics ought to be administered
under such or such conditions. Before initiating medical students into the
study of life, it is also well to teach them to have respect for animal
suffering. I would that it might be thoroughly understood that it is a
matter of absolute necessity to operate upon the animal; and that when the
physiologist resigns himself to this necessity he ought to perform the
operation with sufficient humanity to prevent the animal from suffering. I
willingly recognise that the absence of this first moral precept is a great
gap in most treatises on physiology.
This, however, is about all I can concede to anti-vivisectionists; for
truly they indulge in such queer, extraordinary assertions that we are
completely disconcerted. Some of these fanatics pretend, for example, that
physiologists should practise vivisection upon themselves. To torture a dog
is as criminal as to torture a child, according to them; and animal
suffering is as much to be respected as human suffering! Truly such a
paradox cannot be taken seriously; if it were admitted, evidently the
question is settled. But it cannot be admitted, and the whole of our
argument rests upon this principle, which appears quite evident, that
living beings occupy different positions in the hierarchy of nature.
Let us take a besieged city reduced to famine: will anyone pretend that the
soldiers must be sacrificed before the horses, the mules, etc. Yet the case
is exactly the same. It is in order to avoid the death of human beings
that mice and guinea-pigs are put to death.
To deny the difference in rank of living beings is to deny evidence. A frog
is a nobler animal than a sea-urchin; a dog is a nobler animal than a frog;
for there are degrees in the intelligence, and consequently, in the
capacity to suffer, and in the _quality_ of suffering among the four animal
groups: the sea-urchin, the frog, the dog, and man.
Anti-vivisectionists do not admit reflex movements (which, moreover, they
do not understand); and they bewail the dogs that Goltz and Ewald subjected
to cerebral mutilations which took away all intellectual spontaneity and
prevented them from eating spontaneously. But in those very dogs, precisely
because there is no spontaneity, so there is no longer any consciousness of
pain. They are, therefore, of all the beings in creation those which
deserve the least commiseration; for they are protected against pain by
that very ablation of the brain, the seat of pain.
We are told that it is through cowardice, through the fear of disease, that
vivisection is practised. But fear of disease is not cowardice. I am
neither poltroon nor coward, but I would be very sorry to be attacked by
tuberculosis or cancer. I do not blush to confess that it would be very
disagreeable for me to be hanged, though hanging is much less painful than
tuberculosis or cancer. If it were necessary to have a hanged victim, I
would much prefer that a rabbit were taken in preference to myself; and I
would certainly not put my own neck in the cord to save a dog from torture.
The state of mind of anti-vivisectionists appears to me rather singular,
since they are not at all afraid of disease as far as man is concerned, but
they have great fear of it for animals. If pain is but an empty word,
according to the celebrated phrase of Zeno, why not apply that fine maxim
to the animal?
Sir James Thornton (_The Principal Claims on behalf of Vivisection_,
London, 1907), has endeavoured to compile a list of the contradictions to
be found in the treatises of physiology. He could have added considerably
to the length of this chapter, for the contradictions are innumerable;
which only proves, not that vivisection is useless, but that it is
difficult. What would chemists say if it were maintained that chemical
analysis was absurd because of the contradictions between chemists? They
would, and rightly so, continue to make analyses; for they know that
analysis is a necessary, though an imperfect, instrument. In the same
manner, we shall continue to practise vivisection, though we know right
well that vivisection is an imperfect, though a necessary, instrument.
In the course of a recent debate on vivisection, a voice was heard to call
out that Lister was a brute. That "crowns" everything, and one would think
that nothing more inept could be imagined.
Alas! something more inept still has been said, and I hand over this
prodigious and audacious assertion to the judgment of every man of heart
and common sense. It refers to bacteriology. The author, after having said
that microbes are not the cause of disease, takes refuge behind the opinion
of Lawson Tait (quoted by Mona Caird, _The Inquisition of Science_, p.
20).
"Such experiments never have succeeded, never can: and they have, as in the
cases of Koch, Pasteur, and Lister, not only hindered true progress, but
they have covered our profession with ridicule."
That is something which may well confound us, is it not? and I believe
those great benefactors of humanity, Koch, Pasteur and Lister, may indeed
murmur: "Forgive them; for they know not what they say."
To sum up: the objections of anti-vivisectionists are irrefutable if we
admit, (1) that man has not the right to kill an animal either in
self-defence or for nourishment; (2) that the suffering of an animal is as
worthy of respect as the suffering of a man; and (3) that the misery of one
individual is as sacred as the misery of a thousand individuals. No logical
reply can be made to these three assertions, which, according to my
reasoning, constitute an offence against the most elementary common sense.
But I doubt very much if we shall ever arrive at demonstrating that it is
better to allow one hundred children to die from diphtheria rather than
draw a little blood from a horse; or that we should practise vivisection
on man so as to alleviate the diseases of dogs.
Concerning the polemics of anti-vivisectionists as to the uselessness of
physiology, and the contradictions of physiologists, they are nothing but a
tissue of error and ignorance.
APPENDIX A
We give herewith a table showing the absolute and relative mortality due to
diphtheria in Paris from 1872 to 1905, out of a population of 2,500,000
inhabitants:--
ABSOLUTE. PER 100,000 INHABITANTS.
1872 1135 61
1873 1164 62
1874 1008 52
1875 1328 68
1876 1572 79
1877 2393 117
1878 1995 95
1879 1783 83
1880 2048 94
1881 2211 99
1882 2244 100
1883 1781 79
1884 1928 86
1885 1655 74
1886 1512 67
1887 1585 70
1888 1729 74
1889 1706 72
1890 1668 70
1891 1361 56
1892 1403 58
1893 1266 52
1894 1009 41
1895 435 17
1896 444 17
1897 298 12
1898 259 10
1899 339 13
1900 294 11
1901 736 28
1902 709 26
1903 399 15
1904 260 10
1905 204 7
Let us divide this mortality due to diphtheria into three groups (in Paris
per 100,000 inhabitants):--
A. Before the discovery of serotherapy, from 1872 to
1888.
B. During the period of experimentation with
serotherapy, from 1889 to 1894.
C. After the generalisation of serotherapy, from 1895
to 1905.
We have then the following averages:--
ABSOLUTE. PER 100,000
INHABITANTS.
Before serotherapy 1657 80
Intermediary period 1402 58
After serotherapy 398 15
And should these figures not seem sufficiently eloquent, let us set them
forth in another form:--
ABSOLUTE MORTALITY.
Before the discovery of serotherapy, 1888 1729
1st year of serotherapy, 1889 1706
2nd " " 1890 1668
3rd " " 1891 1361
4th " " 1892 1463
5th " " 1893 1266
6th " " 1894 1009
At this moment the practice of serotherapy, thanks to Roux, became general
in Paris.
1st year, 1895--435.
2nd " 1896--444.
During the next six years there were still hesitations and uncertainties as
to the best method to be employed.
The mortality during these six years, 1897-1902--439.
Then the practice was definitely established.
The mortality for the three years, 1903-1905--288.
These figures are so eloquent, so striking, so precise, that it is not
possible to misunderstand them. They cannot be ignored; and when once they
have been set forth, ignorance is no longer permissible, and it is for that
reason we have here given them.
In Berlin and in Vienna, it is the same thing. From 1894 the mortality due
to diphtheria has diminished to the extent of 150 per cent.
APPENDIX B
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Merbach. UEBER DIE GESCHICHTE DER V. (_Jahresb. d. Ges. f. Nat. u. Heilk.
in Dresd._ 1878, 98-103.)
Metzger (D.). LA VIVISECTION, LES DANGERS, ET LES CRIMES. (8vo, Paris,
1891.)
Moore (W. J.). HARVEY AND VIVISECTION. (_Ind. Med. Gaz._, 1876, 230-233.)
Moquin Tandon. RAPPORT SUR LES VIVISECTIONS. (_Bull. de l'ac. de Médecine
de Paris_, 1862, 948-960.)
Nagel (R.). DER WISSENSCHAFTLICHE UNWERTH DER V IN ALLEN IHREN ARTEN. (8vo,
Berlin, 1881.)
Novi (J.). SULLA V. (_Boll. d. sc. med. di Bologne_, 1893, 263, 421.)
Paget (Stephen). EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS. (_Murray_).
Renault (E.). LA SOC. PROTECTS. DES ANIMAUX ET LA VIVISECTION. (_Rec. de
Méd. vétérin._, 1862, 231-247.)
Renooz (C). A PROPOS DE LA VIVISECTION. (_Médecin_, 1904, 178-179.)
Richet (Ch.). MAN'S RIGHT OVER ANIMALS. (_Pop. Sc. Monthly_, 1884, xxv.,
759-766.)
Smith (R. M.). MATERIA MEDICA AND VIVISECTION. (_Merck's Arch._, 1900,
44-47.)
Smith (R. M.). SHOULD EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS BE RESTRICTED OR ABOLISHED?
(_Therap. Gaz._, 1884, 497, 533.)
Smith (Pye). ON VIVISECTION. (_Brit. Med. Journ._ (2), 1879, 349.)
Stuser (E.). IS VIVISECTION A BENEFIT TO ANIMALS AND MAN, AND JUSTIFIABLE?
(_Med. News_, 1902, 108-111.)
Tait (Lawson.). THE USELESSNESS OF VIVISECTION UPON ANIMALS AS A METHOD OF
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. (London, 8vo, 1883 (?).)
Tuckermann. ABSTRACT OF THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON VIVISECTION.
(_Columb. Med. Journ._, 1897, 237-243.)
Weber (E.). LES CHAMBRES DE TORTURE DE LA SCIENCE. (Paris, Leroux, 8vo,
1879.)
Wilberforce (C). WOMEN, CLERGYMEN AND DOCTORS. (_New Review_, 1893, 85-95.)
Wilks. THE ETHICS OF VIVISECTION. (_Pop. Sc. Monthly_, 1882, xxi.,
344-350.)
Williams. A FEW PERSONAL FACTS CONCERNING EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS OPPOSED TO
THE FALSE FANCIES OF THE PERSECUTORS OF VIVISECTORS. (_Brit. Med. Journ._,
(2), 1876, 104.)
Wolff. DISPUTATIO PHILOSOPHICA DE MORALITATE ANATOMES CIRCA ANIMALIA VICA
OCCUPATAE. (Leipzig, 1709.)
Wood (H.). THE CONTROL OF VIVISECTION. (_Bost. Med. and Surg. Journ._,
1895, 342.)
Zöllner (F.). UEBER DER WISSENSCHAFTLICHEN MISSBRAUCH DER V., MIT
HISTORISCHEN DOCUMENTEN ÜBER DIE V. VON MENSCHEN. (Leipzig, 8vo, 1880, 2nd
ed., 1885.)
APPENDIX C
THE RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY
In January 1908, a Society with the above name was formed in England, the
aims and objects of which are clearly stated in the following letter from
Lord Cromer, its President; this letter was published in the English
newspapers on 24th April 1908:--
SIR,
A Society has been formed, with the name of the Research Defence Society,
to make known the facts as to experiments on animals in this country; the
immense importance to the welfare of mankind of such experiments; and the
great saving of human life and health directly attributable to them.
The great advance that has been made during the last quarter of a century
in our knowledge of the functions of the body, and of the causes of
disease, would have been impossible without a combination of experiment and
observation.
The use of antiseptics, and the modern treatment of wounds, is the direct
outcome of the experiments of Pasteur and Lister. Pasteur's discovery of
the microbial cause of puerperal fever has in itself enormously reduced the
deaths of women in child-birth.
The nature of tuberculosis is now known, and its incidence has materially
diminished.
We owe the invention of diphtheria antitoxin entirely to experiments on
animals.
The causes of plague, cholera, typhoid, Mediterranean fever, and sleeping
sickness, have been discovered solely by the experimental method.
Not only have a large number of drugs been placed at our disposal, but
accurate knowledge has replaced the empirical use of many of those
previously known.
The evidence before the Royal Commission has shown that these experiments
are conducted with proper care; the small amount of pain or discomfort
inflicted is insignificant compared with the great gain to knowledge and
the direct advantage to humanity.
While acknowledging in general the utility of the experimental method,
efforts have been made by a section of the public to throw discredit on all
experiments involving the use of animals. The Research Defence Society will
therefore endeavour to make it clear that medical and other scientific men
who employ these methods are not less humane than the rest of their
countrymen, who daily, though perhaps unconsciously, profit by them.
The Society proposes to give information to all enquirers, to publish
_précis_, articles, and leaflets, to make arrangements for lectures, to
send speakers, if required, to debates, and to assist all who desire to
examine the arguments on behalf of experiments on animals. It hopes to
establish branches in our chief cities, and thus to be in touch with all
parts of the kingdom; and to be at the service of municipal bodies,
hospitals, and other public institutions.
The Society was formed on 27th January of the present year, and already
numbers more than 800 members.[9] It is not an association of men of
science or of medical men alone; its membership has been drawn from all
departments of public life, and includes representatives of every class of
educated Englishmen and Englishwomen, including many who have taken an
active part in the prevention of cruelty to animals. This fact is in itself
a remarkable protest against the attacks which have been made on the
researches that the Society has been formed to defend.
The annual subscription is five shillings to cover working expenses: but
larger subscriptions, or donations, will be gladly received. The acting
Hon. Treasurer, _pro tem._, is Mr J. Luard Pattisson, C.B. (of the Lister
Institute),[10] and an account in the Society's name has been opened with
Messrs Coutts & Co., 440 Strand. The Hon. Secretary is Mr Stephen Paget, 70
Harley Street, W., to whom all communications should be addressed.
Yours faithfully,
CROMER, _President_.
The following is a list of the pamphlets already issued by the Society:--
1. Letter from the President announcing the formation of the Society, April
24.
2. Report of the inaugural meeting.
3. Experiments on animals during 1907 in Great Britain and Ireland.
4. Some facts as to the administration of the Act.
5. The value of antitoxin in the treatment of diphtheria.
6. Evidence of Sir Frederick Treves.
7. Yellow fever and malaria.
8. Extinction of Malta fever.
9. Have experiments on animals advanced Therapeutics?
10. The work of the Research Defence Society.
11. Vivisection and medicine. Evidence of Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton
before the Royal Commission.
All or any of these will be forwarded on application to the Hon. Secretary,
Mr Stephen Paget, 70 Harley Street, London, W. Other pamphlets are in
active preparation; arrangements are also being made for meetings, and for
the organisation of Branch Societies in many parts of the kingdom; the
Society is also concerned in the institution of a similar movement for the
defence of research in America.
Space does not permit the publication of the full list of members of the
Society. The following list of the President and Vice-Presidents, however,
will show that those who have joined are representative not only of the
leading men and women in the medical profession, but also of those who are
pre-eminent in various other branches of science, in literature, politics,
art, and theology.
PRESIDENT
THE EARL OF CROMER, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., O.M.
VICE-PRESIDENTS
HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF ABERCORN, K.G.
SIR WILLIAM ABNEY, K.C.B., F.R.S.
SIR T. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT, K.C.B., F.R.S. (_Regius Professor of Physic,
University of Cambridge_).
SIR L. ALMA-TADEMA, O.M., R.A.
MRS GARRETT ANDERSON, M.D.
SIR WILLIAM ANSON, BT., D.C.L., M.P.
THE RT. HON. LORD AVEBURY, F.R.S.
[A]SIR JOHN BANKS, K.C.B., M.D.
THE RT. HON. LORD BARRYMORE.
THE MARQUIS OF BATH.
LADY BLISS.
LADY BUCKLEY.
LADY BURDON-SANDERSON.
LORD BLYTH.
THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CANTERBURY, D.D.
EARL CATHCART.
LORD ROBERT CECIL, K.C., M.P.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF CHESTER, D.D.
THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHESTER, D.D.
LORD CHEYLESMORE, C.V.O. (_Chairman, Middlesex Hospital_).
THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH, D.D.
SIR JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE, F.R.S.
THE COUNTESS OF CROMER.
THE RT. HON. SIR SAVILE CROSSLEY, BT., M.V.O.
SIR EDMUND HAY CURRIE.
LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON, G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., F.R.S.
THE REV. DR DALLINGER, F.R.S.
FRANCIS DARWIN, ESQ., F.R.S.
SIR GEORGE H. DARWIN, K.C.B., F.R.S.
SIR JAMES DEWAR, F.R.S.
SIR A. CONAN DOYLE, LL.D.
THE REV. CANON DUCKWORTH, C.V.O.
THE RT. REV. THE BISHOP OF EDINBURGH, D.D.
EARL EGERTON.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER, D.D.
LORD FABER.
THE REV. A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D.D., LL.D. (_Principal of Mansfield College,
Oxford_).
LORD FARRER.
SIR LUKE FILDES, R.A.
LORD FORTESCUE.
SIR THOMAS FRASER, M.D., F.R.S. (_Professor of Clinical Medicine,
University of Edinburgh_).
SIR DAVID GILL, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S.
THE EARL OF GLASGOW, G.C.M.G.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF GRANTHAM, D.D.
FIELD-MARSHAL LORD GRENFELL, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.
THE HON. WALTER GUINNESS, M.P.
THE RT. HON. THE EARL OF HALSBURY, K.B., F.R.S.
LORD CLAUD HAMILTON.
H. A. HARBEN, ESQ. (_Chairman, St Mary's Hospital_).
J. T. HELBY, ESQ. (_Chairman, Metropolitan Asylums Board_).
SIR SAMUEL HOARE, BT.
THE HON. SYDNEY HOLLAND (_Chairman, London Hospital_).
SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER, G.C.S.I., F.R.S., O.M.
SIR WILLIAM HUGGINS, K.C.B., F.R.S., O.M.
J. HUGHLINGS JACKSON, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.
MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES, LITT.D. (_Provost of King's College, Cambridge_).
SIR ALFRED JONES, K.C.M.G.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF KINGSTON.
THE EARL OF KILMOREY (_Chairman, Charing Cross Hospital_).
LORD LAMINGTON, G.C.M.G.
SIR E. RAY LANKESTER, K.C.B., F.R.S.
R. F. C. LEITH, M.SC., (_Professor of Pathology, Birmingham_).
THE RT. HON. LORD LINDLEY, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S.
SIR NORMAN LOCKYER, K.C.B., F.R.S.
THE RT. HON. WALTER LONG, M.P.
HENRY LUCAS, ESQ. (_Chairman, University College Hospital_).
LORD LUDLOW.
THE HON. G. W. SPENCER LYTTELTON, C.B.
FREDERICK MACMILLAN, ESQ. (_Chairman, National Hospital for the Paralysed
and Epileptic_).
THE RT. HON. SIR HERBERT E. MAXWELL, BT., F.R.S.
LORD METHUEN, G.C.B., K.C.V.O.
HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MONTROSE.
LADY DOROTHY NEVILL.
THE EARL OF NORTHBROOK (_President, Cancer Hospital_).
LORD NORTHCLIFFE.
WILLIAM OSLER, M.D., F.R.S. (_Regius Professor of Medicine, University of
Oxford_).
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD, D.D.
SIR GILBERT PARKER, D.C.L., M.P.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS, ESQ.
COUNT PLUNKETT.
SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK, BT., LL.D., D.C.L.
SIR JOHN DICKSON POYNDER, BT., M.P. (_Chairman, Great Northern Hospital_).
LADY PRIESTLEY.
THE RT. REV. THE BISHOP OF NORTH QUEENSLAND, D.D.
SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY, K.C.B., F.R.S.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF RANGOON.
SIR JAMES REID, BT., G.C.V.O.
LADY RUSSELL REYNOLDS.
THE VERY REV. HON. THE DEAN OF RIPON, D.D.
BRITON RIVIERE, ESQ., R.A., D.C.L.
MRS ROGET.
MRS ROMANES.
SIR HENRY ROSCOE, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.
[A]THE RT. HON. THE EARL OF ROSSE, K.P., LL.D., F.R.S. (_Chancellor of the
University of Dublin_).
LORD ROTHSCHILD, G.C.V.O.
SIR ARTHUR RÜCKER, F.R.S.
THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF SALISBURY, D.D.
THE RT. HON. THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY.
THE RT. HON. THE MARQUIS OF SLIGO.
ISABEL MARCHIONESS OF SLIGO.
THE RT. HON. SIR CECIL CLEMENTI SMITH, G.C.M.G.
SIR THOMAS SMITH, BT., K.C.V.O.
THE HON. W. F. D. SMITH, M.P. (_Chairman, Removal Fund, King's College
Hospital_).
THE HON. SIR RICHARD SOLOMON, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.
SIR EDGAR SPEYER, BT. (_President, Poplar Hospital_).
THE RT. HON. LORD STALBRIDGE.
LORD STANLEY, K.C.V.O.
LORD STRATHCONA, G.C.M.G.
LADY SUTTON.
MAJ.-GEN. SIR REGINALD TALBOT, K.C.B.
SIR FREDERICK TREVES, BT., G.C.V.O.
SIR JOHN BATTY TUKE, M.P.
SIR WILLIAM TURNER, K.C.B., F.R.S. (_Principal of the University of
Edinburgh_).
JAMES G. WAINWRIGHT, ESQ. (_Chairman, St Thomas's Hospital_).
_Earl Waldegrave._
_The Rt. Rev. Bishop Welldon._
HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, K.G.
A. W. WEST, ESQ. (_Treasurer and Chairman, St George's Hospital_).
SIR JAMES WHITEHEAD, BT. (_First President of the Lister Institute_).
MRS ROBERT PEEL WETHERED.
SIR SAMUEL WILKS, BT., F.R.S.
THE RT. HON. SIR ALFRED WILLS.
THE RT. REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.
THE REV. H. G. WOODS, D.D. (_Master of the Temple_).
[Note A: Since deceased.]
FOOTNOTES:
[9] 22nd October 1908. The number of members is now over 1530, of whom 160
are ladies.
[10] 27th May. Dr Sandwith, 31 Cavendish Square, London, W., is now Hon.
Treasurer.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
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