Vivisection: A Prize Essay

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Women's Branch of the Pa. Soc. for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1871 - Animal welfare - 57 pages

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Page 42 - Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive ; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon ; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected...
Page 43 - I know not, that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his humanity. It is time that universal resentment should arise against those horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man confidence in man, and make the physician more dreadful than the gout...
Page 47 - Such actions of charity are the overflowings of a mild good-nature on all below us. It is certainly the part of a wellnatured man to take care of his...
Page 43 - What is alleged in defence of those hateful practices, every one knows ; but the truth is, that by knives, fire, and poison, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. The experiments that have been tried, are tried again ; he that burned an animal with irons yesterday, will be willing to amuse himself with burning another to-morrow. I know not, that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured.
Page 38 - Th' essay of bloody feasts on brutes began, And after forged the sword to murder man. DEYDEN. I CANNOT think it extravagant to imagine, that mankind are no less in proportion accountable for the ill use of their dominion over creatures of the lower rank of beings, than for the exercise of tyranny over their own species. The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we should seem for our mismanagement of it ; and the rather, as the very condition of nature...
Page 16 - After delaying long, on account of the unpleasant nature of the operation, I opened the spinal canal of a rabbit, and cut the posterior roots of the nerves of the lower extremity ; the creature crawled, but I was deterred from repeating the experiment, by the protracted cruelty of the dissection. I reflected, that an experiment would be satisfactory, if done on an animal recently knocked down and insensible...
Page 17 - Experiments have never been the means of discovery — and a survey of what has been attempted of late years in physiology, will prove that the opening of living animals has done more to perpetuate error than to confirm the just views taken from the study of anatomy and natural motions.
Page 25 - ... it saw or heard me, I put out its eyes. I could then appear before it without its manifesting any aversion. I spoke, and immediately its barkings and furious movements proved the passion which animated it.
Page 37 - They who object," says Dr. Blundell, " to the putting of animals to death for a scientific purpose, do not reflect that the death of an animal is a very different thing from that of man. To an animal, death is an eternal sleep ; to man, it is the commencement of a new and untried state of existence. . . . Shall it be said that the objects of physiological science are not worth the sacrifice of a few animals ! Men are constantly forming the most erroneous estimates of the comparative importance of...

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