88 ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 



ence with medical research. They are wrong in believing 

 their fellow citizens to be less merciful than themselves, and 

 doubly wrong in supposing that researches upon which 

 depends the welfare of multitudes can be judged by the 

 untrained and superficial. In reality enrolled against the 

 humanity which they would serve, they are indeed blind 

 leaders of the blind. There are some to whom agitation 

 has become a necessary stimulant, and who drink a delu- 

 sion as the victim of alcohol drinks rum. Such persons 

 are, as a rule, impervious to evidence. The sane objector 

 to animal experimentation would alter his opinion could 

 he be brought to solid ground from out the clouds of preju- 

 dice and error which systematic agitation has thrown about 

 this subject. Let him stand by the bedside of a child in- 

 fected with laryngeal diphtheria. He marks the labored 

 breathing, the small but frequent pulse, the pallid features, 

 already slightly livid. He knows that diphtheria so far 

 advanced as this is usually fatal. In his hand is a vial of 

 antitoxin. Shall he use it --this new remedy that has re- 

 duced the deaths from fifty-five to ten in every hundred 

 cases? Shall he give this product of the laboratories, born 

 of experimentation upon living animals, prepared from 

 animals and tested on them? He must make immediate 

 choice. Death waits for his decision. What man of real 

 humanity could hesitate? What will probably be the out- 

 come should he refuse? The progress of this frightful 

 disease has been thus described by a celebrated teacher : l 

 " The difficulty of respiration increases in severity. Every 

 hour, or every two or three hours, a suffocative fit comes 

 on. The suffocative attacks follow one another more rap- 

 idly, and become more and more violent. From time to 



1 A. Trousseau, Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Paris Faculty from 

 1850 to 1867. The description here given is condensed from his Lectures on 

 Clinical Medicine, delivered at the Hotel-Dieu ; translated by Sir John Rose 

 Cormack and Ur. Bazire, vol. i, pp. 342-344. 



