84 ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 



Any sort of experimentation by physicians is unpleasant 

 to most men. It suggests that the art of healing is in a 

 state of transition, as, indeed, it is. The idea is not attract- 

 ive to patients, who become conservatives directly they 

 fall ill. Only the physician can know how truly glorious 

 are the fruits of experimentation in medicine. Others may 

 reflect with satisfaction on the lowered death rate, the 

 lessening of pain to men and animals, and the immense 

 savings in money which have followed the systematic ap- 

 plication of the experimental method in medicine. The 

 physician remembers the child dying of a disease now 

 curable --the mother numb with anguish, her famished 

 eyes searching his face for the least hope, half-appalled, 

 half-certain that death cannot come while he is with her. 

 It is a bitter thought that each new triumph comes too late 

 for many homes. 



Sometime I shall write a book on " Lives I Might have 

 Saved " - lives which were lost seventeen years ago in the 

 general hospital in St. Louis. Had we known then what 

 we know now, the father upon whom wife and child de- 

 pended, the mother, the stay of her household, strong men 

 fit to do the work of the world, youths of promise, would 

 this day still walk the streets, happy in the love of kindred 

 and of friends. Here and there solitary minds trained for 

 work on the frontiers of knowledge were striving to pierce 

 the gloom through which many a disease could be dimly 

 seen marching to the fatal end. A few years more and the 

 human beings whom I saw die would have been saved. 



At the period of which I speak the City Hospital in 

 St. Louis was a young institution, as age is reckoned in 

 most communities ; but it was old enough to have passed 

 through terrible scenes. How easy to understand that 

 t \\cnty-five years ago those who entered hospitals left hope 

 behind ! Infection lurked within the walls, and from time 

 to time became epidemic, raging like the plague. A pin 



