64 ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 



means to successfully protect the community a great 

 advance in practical medicine. 



4. It has given in the antitoxic diphtheria serum a most 

 reliable means of preventing and of curing the disease, 

 enabling us to prevent suffering and to save many valuable 

 lives. 



From an experience of three years ('89-'92) in the 

 diphtheria ward of the Boston City Hospital, I was able 

 to portray the horrible suffering of the children afflicted 

 with the disease before the days of antitoxin. The mor- 

 tality in the ward was forty-five per cent. Under the use 

 of antitoxin the mortality has been reduced to nine per 

 cent, and the cases of suffering are rare. 



I cited the case of my own child, who had diphtheria in 

 malignant form, and who was saved by antitoxin when 

 all other measures would have been fruitless. No father 

 whose child had been saved by such means would care 

 how many lives of animals had been sacrificed in the dis- 

 covery. We cannot use the rabbit as a unit in estimating 

 the value of our children's lives ! 



The section of the bill which requires the animals to be 

 killed immediately, while still under the influence of the 

 anesthetic, would prevent us from proving that new surgi- 

 cal procedures which we think would help to save life can 

 be safely tried on living tissues. Where we now first test 

 these measures on the living tissues of animals, we should 

 have to try such measures first on human beings, without 

 any further proof of their efficacy than our opinion that 

 they would be beneficial. To this extent this section of 

 the bill is calculated to substitute human experimentation 

 for animal experimentation. 



I objected to the bill finally because inspection was to 

 be carried on under the auspices of a society which has 

 shown itself prejudiced on this subject. 



Yours truly, 



HORACE D. ARNOLD, M.D. 



