EXTRACT

FROM

"MEDICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA," BEING THE ANNUAL ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE "MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL

SOCIETY," JUNE 7, 1871,

BY

HENRY J. BIGELOW, M. D.,

PROFESSOR OF SURGERY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

How few facts of immediate considerable value to our race have of late years been extorted from the dreadful sufferings of dumb animals, the cold-blooded cruelties now more and more practised under the authority of Science!

The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present value to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a Tungstate of Zirconium: perhaps to be confuted the next year; perhaps to remain as fixed truth of immediate value,-contemptible, compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture.

For every inch cut by one of these experimenters in the quivering tissues of the helpless dog or rabbit or Guinea-pig let him insert a lancet one-eighth of an inch

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into his own skin, and for every inch more he cuts let him advance the lancet another eighth of an inch, and whenever he seizes, with ragged forceps, a nerve or spinal marrow, the seat of all that is concentrated and exquisite in agony, or literally tears out nerves by their roots, let him cut only one-eighth of an inch further, and he may have some faint suggestion of the atrocity he is perpetrating, when the Guinea-pig shrieks, the poor dog yells, the noble horse groans and strains-the heartless vivisector perhaps resenting the struggle which annoys him.

My heart sickens as I recall the spectacle at Alfort, in former times, of a wretched horse, one of many hundreds, broken with age, and disease resulting from lifelong and honest devotion to man's service, bound upon the floor, his skin scored with a knife like a gridiron, his eyes and ears cut out, his teeth pulled, his arteries. laid bare, his nerves exposed and pinched and severed, his hoofs pared to the quick, and every conceivable and fiendish torture inflicted upon him, while he groaned and gasped, his life carefully preserved under this continued and hellish torment, from early morning until afternoon, for the purpose, as was avowed, of familiarizing the pupil with the motions of the animal. This was surgical vivisection on a little larger scale, and transcends but little the scenes in a physiological laboratory. I have heard it said that "somebody must do this." I say, it is needless. Nobody should do it. Watch the students at a vivisection. It is the blood and suffering, not the science, that rivets their breath

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less attention. If hospital service makes young students less tender of suffering, vivisection deadens their humanity, and begets indifference to it.

In experiments upon the nervous system of the living animal, whose sensibility must be kept alive, not benumbed by the blessed influence of anesthesia, a prodigal waste of suffering results from the difficulty of assigning to each experiment its precise and proximate effect. The rumpled feathers of a pigeon deprived of his cerebellum may indicate not so much a specific action of the cerebellum on the skin, as the more probable fact that the poor bird feels sick. The rotatory phenomena, once considered so curious a result of the removal of a cerebral lobe, were afterwards suspected to proceed from the struggles of the victim with his remaining undamaged and unpalsied side. Who can say whether the Guinea-pig, the pinching of whose carefully sensitized neck throws him into convulsions, attains this blessed momentary respite of insensibility by an unexplained special machinery of the nervous currents, or a sensibility too exquisitely acute for animal endurance? Better that I or my friend should die than protract existence through accumulated years of torture upon animals whose exquisite suffering we cannot fail to infer, even though they may have neither voice nor feature to express it.

If a skilfully constructed hypothesis could be elaborated up to the point of experimental test by the most accomplished and successful philosopher, and if then a single experiment, though cruel, would forever settle

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it, we might reluctantly admit that it was justified. But the instincts of our common humanity indignantly remonstrate against the testing of clumsy or unimportant hypotheses by prodigal experimentation, or making the torture of animals an exhibition to enlarge a medical school, or for the entertainment of students, not one in fifty of whom can turn it to any profitable account. The limit of such physiological experiment, in its utmost latitude, should be to establish truth in the hands of a skilful experimenter, with the greatest economy of suffering, and not to demonstrate it to ignorant classes and encourage them to repeat it.

The re-action which follows every excess will in time bear indignantly upon this. Until then, it is dreadful to think how many poor animals will be subjected to excruciating agony, as one medical college after another becomes penetrated with the idea that vivisection is a part of modern teaching, and that, to hold way with other institutions, they, too, must have their vivisector, their mutilated dogs, their Guineapigs, their rabbits, their chamber of torture and of horrors to advertise as a laboratory.

From

REPORT OF THE

SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS IN FRANCE.

SEPTEMBER, 1871.

List of Publications received.

"L'ACTE de la Deglutition son Mecanism, par le docteur Moura. Paris, 1867. Delahaye. Ce livre était accompagné d'une lettre d'envoi, d'où nous extrayons ce passage significatif.

"La découverte que j'ai faite sur le déglutition n'a couté la vio à aucun animal. Cependant, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours, c'est àdire jusqu'en 1861 les physiologistes de tous les pays ont sacrifié les animaux le chien surtout, ce fidèle ami de l'homme, pour arriver à la connaissance de la déglutition chez l'homme.

"Magendie, en particulier, a laissé parmi nous, ses contemporains, une trop célèbre réputation à cet égard.

"Les expériences in anima vili sont souvent inutiles; elles conduisent rarement au résultat que l'ou attend.

"Je démontre à l'aide d'un instrument particulier, que la deglutition chez l'homme s'opère autrement que chez le chien. "Ce serait done une cruauté sans excuse que de renouveler a ce sujet les hecatombes animales de mes prédécesseurs."[Bulletin de la Société Protectrice des Animaux. Paris. Septembre, 1871.

[TRANSLATION.]

"The Act of Deglutition. Its Mechanism. By Doctor Moura. Paris. 1867. Delahaye." This book was accompanied by an introductory letter, from which we extract this significant passage:

"The discovery that I have made in deglutition has not cost the life of a single animal. Yet from the most remote times