JAMES J. PUTNAM 57 



It is true that a number of excellent men believe that 

 experiments with animals have not contributed much to 

 medical progress, but as regards this point two facts should 

 be considered : 



1. There is no subject on which opinions are uniform. 

 Most of us believe that vaccination is useful and should be 

 made compulsory, but there is a society in England con- 

 taining men like Herbert Spencer and Alfred Wallace who 

 think that vaccination is useless and should not be enforced. 



2. The discoveries of physiologists do not always stand 

 out in an isolated form so that their value can be set 

 clearly over against that of clinical observation. On the 

 contrary, these two methods of investigation are so closely 

 interwoven that any one who chooses to say that the ad- 

 vance at any given point was all due to clinical observa- 

 tion, may easily persuade himself, with the aid of a little 

 prejudice, that he is right. Thus, Mr. French has asked 

 whether the discovery of the functions of the thyroid was 

 not due to clinical observation. This is true, indeed, -of the 

 first discovery, but it is by no means true as applied to our 

 present knowledge of the thyroid functions. 



Finally, it is worthy of note that where experiments with 

 animals cannot be made it is more likely that experiments 

 upon human beings will be undertaken. If the chemists 

 who had long known that the inhalation of ether would 

 cause insensibility had determined by careful experiments 

 with different classes of animals the character of this insen- 

 sibility and the limits of the danger involved, the world 

 would have had the boon of surgical anesthesia some years 

 earlier, and the risks attending the first trials with human 

 subjects would have been avoided. 



