VIVISECTION.1 THE worst vivisection is oftener mitigated by anæsthetics than formerly, and anti-vivisectionists deserve the credit of the change. But, on the other hand, there is a great deal more vivisection now, and more work is required to keep it within proper limits. in There can be no question that the discussion of vivisection arouses antagonistic human instincts. It is no common subject which enlists such earnest and opposite opinions. That there is something wrong about it is evident from the way which the reputation of inflicting its torture is disclaimed. That for some reason it is a fascinating pursuit is equally evident from the bitter contest made for the right to practise it. Having, in another connection, clearly stated my own. views upon this subject, I need not again recite them in detail. There is little in the literature of what is called the horrors of vivisection which is not well grounded on truth. For a description of the pain inflicted I refer to that literature, only reiterating that what it recounts is largely and simply fact, selected it may be, but rarely exaggerated. Vivisection is not an innocent study. We may usefully popularize chemistry and electricity, their teaching and their experimentation, even if only as one way of cultivating human powers. But not so with painful vivisection. We may not move as freely in this direction, for there are distinct reasons against it. It can be indiscriminately pursued only by torturing animals; and the word torture is here 1 Now first published. intentionally used to convey the idea of very severe pain, sometimes the severest conceivable pain, of indefinite duration, often terminating, fortunately for the animal, with its life, but as often only after hours or days of refined infliction, continuously or at intervals. A man about to be burned under a railroad car begs somebody to kill him. The Hindoo suttee has been abolished for its inhumanity, and yet it is a statement to be taken literally, that a brief death by burning would be considered a happy release by a human being undergoing the experience of some of the animals who slowly die in a laboratory. Scientific vivisection has all the engrossing fascination of other physical sciences, but the transcendent torture sometimes inflicted has no parallel in any one of them. As to its extent, we read that in the course of ten years seventeen thousand dogs were dissected alive in one laboratory. The difficulty is that the community, for want of time or opportunity themselves to investigate the subject, are willing to rely upon the discretion of scientific men. This is an error. In matters of this sort people are reluctant to doubt the infallibility of their doctors. A recent Boston journal says, "The scientists who practise vivisection are neither brutes nor savages, and it is going to be hard work to convince sensible people that they are." The answer to this remark is, that it would have formerly applied with equal force to the upholders of slavery, and yet after some hard work sensible people were convinced, and abolished it. A recent distinguished writer, a good judge of men, makes the following observation: "Who can say why the votaries of science, though eminently kind in their social relations, are so angular of character? In my analysis of the scientific nature I am constrained to associate with it, as compared with that of men who are more Christians than scientists, a certain hardness, or rather indelicacy of feeling. They strike me as being somewhat unsympathetic, and capable only of cold friendship, coolly indifferent to the warmer human feelings."1 It should not for a moment be supposed that cultivation of the intellect leads a man to shrink from inflicting pain. Many educated men are no more humane, are in fact far less so, than many comparatively uneducated people. Having seen something of surgery for half a century, I unhesitatingly give the opinion that unwillingness to inflict physical pain, whether upon man or brute, is largely an implanted instinct, with which human nature is very unequally endowed. Also, that this instinct becomes blunted by habit. The more eminent the vivisectionist, the more indifferent he usually is to inflicting pain; however cultivated his intellect, he is sometimes absolutely indifferent to it. Let us consider the question of the abstract right to vivisect. A dog has at least as perfect senses, as acute feeling, and as perfect physical machinery, as a man. He has also a not inconsiderable share of the mind possessed by the human race. The right to vivisect a dog for the benefit of mankind inevitably involves the right, apart from human legislation, to dissect alive a living idiot or the lowest grade of savage. The argument may be stated thus. Man has no prescriptive right to torture his fellow man for his own benefit, no matter how imperfect or defective his organization may be. On the same ground, he has no prescriptive right to torture an intelligent dog, a horse, or an elephant for profit, unless it can be distinctly shown, from a scientific as well as a theological standpoint, that man is the highest creation possible to the universe, that he possesses the might that is said to make right. On that questionable ground, for 1 Henry M. Stanley, In Darkest Africa, vol. ii. p. 161, 1890. there is no other, man might offer a plausible pretext for subjecting the world beneath him to torture which he can sometimes turn in a comparatively small degree to his own advantage. But is it the case? Man is but a parasite upon a speck of dust whirling in infinite space. Who will deny that in infinite space there are higher beings than man? The possibility is all that is needed for the argument. The vivisector of dogs would undoubtedly object to being himself dissected alive by a superior being for the good of anybody, whether in the pursuit of science, or of a fascinating amusement, or with the hope of making a discovery, or of increasing the reputation of a college, or of gaining a little scientific prominence. In offering this objection to being himself dissected alive for the benefit of somebody else, the vivisector would have the support of the community. Why then has not the dog a right to the active defence of the community? But, in order to oppose vivisection to best advantage, and especially lest he place himself in a false position, the antivivisectionist should bear clearly in mind that what he opposes is painful vivisection only. For there have been wholly painless experiments upon living animals which have led to useful results. Some of the greatest discoveries in medical science were made with no pain whatever; except by a perversion of the term, they involved no vivisection. And yet they have been often and sophistically cited by the vivisector as plausible arguments for inflicting both excessive and useless pain. The fact that a few able men have made discoveries by certain painless experiments upon living animals is used to justify the demonstration of torture to medical students, to whom it is as profitless as any medical information can be, and its practice by them. The discovery of anesthesia has been time and again quoted in favor of vivisection. This is simply preposterous. In - making that discovery the experiments from the beginning were painless, and were therefore wholly unobjectionable, as I happen to know, having seen the first of them. The same is true of Jenner's vaccination, which was a wholly painless discovery. Little pain was involved in all that was needed to discover the circulation of the blood, which was inferred from the valvular construction of the veins and then easily substantiated. The sequences of tubercular inoculation are attended by little or no pain of the sort here objected to. They are those of usual medical disease, and cannot be classed with a protracted cutting with knives or burning with hot irons. Seeing a man with hydrophobia, I have doubted whether the mere convulsions of that disease, though fatal, were very painful; and if not, its inoculation is comparatively unobjectionable. As for cerebral surgery, it is a curious subject for investigation, rather than a very profitable or a widely applicable one. The greatest prizes in the lottery of physiological and pathological discovery have involved little or no pain. But the usual and staple work of a so called Laboratory of Vivisection, Physiology, or Pathology, for the education and practice of medical students in the unrestricted cutting of living animals, and for the indiscriminate and endless repetition of experiments already tried, where a live dog can be bought and his living nerves dissected, exactly as, in a common dissecting room, you can buy a dead human subject and dissect its nerves, all this is a very different affair. A distinguished vivisector once remarked, "To us pain is nothing." When it is remembered that this pain may be, and sometimes intentionally is, of the most excruciating nature possible for human science to invent, and that in a large majority of instances it is to little or no purpose, the remark of this vivisector covers the objectionable ground. |