HENRY P. BOWDITCH 75 



Dr. Bigelow's much quoted address does not, however, 

 contain all that he has written on this subject. 



In a volume entitled " Surgical Anaesthesia: " Addresses 

 and other papers by Henry Jacob Bigelow, Boston, Little, 

 Brown & Co., 1900, are published for the first time two 

 papers on the subject of vivisection. In one of them, en- 

 titled " A letter to ' Our Dumb Animals,' " but never pub- 

 lished by that journal, Dr. Bigelow writes as follows : 



" The question of pain leads to a part of the subject 

 generally overlooked, which underlies the whole dis- 

 cussion. Let me briefly emphasize this. The real ex- 

 ception raised does not lie against vivisection, but 

 against painful vivisection. The dissection of an ani- 

 mal in a state of insensibility is no more to be criticised 

 than is the abrupt killing of it, to which no one objects. 

 The confounding of a painful vivisection and an ex- 

 periment which does not cause pain either because 

 the animal is under ether, or because the experiment 

 itself is painless, like those pertaining to the action of 

 most drugs, or because it is a trivial one and gives 

 little suffering has done great damage to the cause 

 of humanity, and has placed the opponent of vivisec- 

 tion at a great disadvantage. If all experiments in 

 physiology were as painless as those in chemistry, 

 there would be but one side to this question. A pain- 

 less experiment upon an animal is unobjectionable." 



It is thus evident that Dr. Bigelow, were he alive to-day, 

 would oppose the present bill, since painless and painful 

 demonstrations are by it alike prohibited. 



What is now the contention of the remonstrants against 

 this bill? 



In the first place, we resent with some indignation the 

 intimation that we are less humane than our critics. We 

 claim indeed that our humanity is of a higher order than 



