56 ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 



and we cannot keep such instructors if we hamper them 

 in their teaching and their researches. In such case they 

 will go elsewhere, and medical progress in this community 

 will be blocked. 



It seems reasonable to demand that " unnecessary ex- 

 periments " should be avoided ; but the decision as to 

 what is unnecessary must, in the end, be left to the judg- 

 ment of the men who have such work in charge, even at 

 the risk that they may sometimes. err. Let any one go 

 into a laboratory of chemistry or physics and he will see 

 how many thousands of experiments, apparently aimless 

 and useless, have to be made before some great discovery 

 (as the telephone or the X ray) results, though the final 

 experiment that led to this discovery may seem simple 

 enough when once it has been done. I agree with the 

 petitioners that restrictions against cruelty are necessary, 

 but I believe that no restrictions could be devised equal 

 in importance to those already provided by having the 

 physiologists and experimental pathologists chosen from 

 among men of the best training, traditions, and character 

 that the community affords. Public opinion and a sense 

 of humanity are stronger deterrents than the law. 



In answer to a question from Mr. French (counsel for 

 the petitioners) as to whether a man might not be a first- 

 rate physician or surgeon without having been himself an 

 experimenter in physiology, I said that I thought such a 

 man might be a good physician or surgeon but not the best. 

 In illustration I cited the case of Mr. Horsley, of London, 

 an exceedingly able physiologist as well as perhaps the 

 first surgeon of England in his line (surgery of the nervous 

 system), whose practical success has been in part a direct 

 outcome of his experimental work. The limited amount 

 of experimentation done by myself in my early days greatly 

 contributed to my own interest and zeal in the study of 

 neurology. 



