OUR RECENT DEBTS TO VIVISECTION. 9 



tried by deadly experiments upon man, or else be hopelessly given 

 up? 



In 1869 I was called to see a man suffering to the last degree from 

 an abscess in the loin. I recognized the fact that it arose from the 

 kidney, but I was powerless. All that I could do was to mitigate, and 

 that, alas ! but little, his pitiless sufferings till death came to his relief, 

 after nearly a year of untold agony. I have never forgotten his suf- 

 ferings, nor the sharp pain 1 felt when I learned, two years later, how 

 I might possibly have saved his life. In the very same year (1869), 

 Simon, of Heidelberg,* had a woman under his care suffering from 

 urinary fistulae from a healthy kidney a surgical accident he in 

 vain tried to heal. That she could live with one kidney had the other 

 gradually been disabled by disease was probable, for one such diseased 

 kidney had been already removed three times when mistaken for 

 ovarian disease ; and physiologists had often removed one or both 

 kidneys in animals. But no one had removed a healthy kidney, and 

 then studied the effects on the remaining kidney and upon the heart ; 

 no one had tested what was the best method of reaching the kidney, 

 whether by the abdomen or the loin, or how to deal with its capsule, 

 or the hemorrhage, or the surgical after-effects. Of course, Simon 

 could have tried the experiment on his patient, blindly trusting to 

 Providence for the result. But he chose the wiser course. He studied 

 the previous literature, experimented on a number of dogs and watched 

 the points above noted, tried various methods of operating upon the 

 dead body, and, after weighing all the pros and cons, deliberately cut 

 down upon the kidney of his patient after a carefully formulated 

 plan, not by the abdomen, but through the loin, and saved her life. 

 She died in 1877, after eight years of healthy life, free from her loath- 

 some disorder. 



Now, what have been the results of these experiments upon a few 

 dogs ? One hundred and ninety-eight times the kidney has been re- 

 moved, and 105 human lives have been saved ; 83 times abscesses in 

 the kidney have been opened, and 66 lives saved ; 17 times stones 

 have been removed from the kidney without a single death or, in all, 

 in the last fifteen years, 298 operations, and 188 human lives saved. 

 Besides this, as an extension of the operation in 17 cases, in which the 

 kidney, having no such attachments as ought to anchor it in place, 

 was floating loosely in the abdomen and a source of severe pain, it 

 has been cut down upon and sewed fast in its proper place ; and all of 

 these patients but one recovered. 



Looking to the future, when not hundreds but thousands of hu- 

 man beings will enjoy the benefits of these operations, and in increasing 

 percentages of recoveries, are not the sufferings inflicted on these few 

 dogs amply justified as in the highest sense kind and humane ? f 



* Simon, "Cbirurgie der Niercn," 1871, preface. 



f Very erroneous views prevail as to the sufferings of animals from experiments upon 



