THE PAINLESS EXTINCTION OF LIFE. 641 



THE PAINLESS EXTINCTION OF LIFE * 



By benjamin WAKD EICEAKDSON, M. D., F. E. S. 



DURING the latter part of 1883 and the early part of 1884, 1 con- 

 structed at the Dogs' Home, Battersea, at the request of the 

 committee of that institution, a lethal chamber for the painless extinc- 

 tion of the life of the animals which have, of necessity, to be destroyed 

 there. I put the process first into operation on Monday, May 15th, 

 by subjecting thirty-eight dogs to the fatal narcotic vapor. They 

 all passed quickly into sleep, and from sleep into death. Since that 

 time, for a period of seven months, the lethal chamber has been regu- 

 larly in use. From two hundred to two hundred and fifty dogs per 

 week have been painlessly killed in it, or a total of nearly seven 

 thousand. 



The thought of applying the anaesthetic method to the painless de- 

 struction of the lives of the lower animals, and the first accomplishment 

 of it, came from myself, and dates back as far as the year 1850. In 

 that year, I constructed at Mortlake, where I was then starting in 

 practice, a small lethal chamber, to which my neighbors would fre- 

 quently bring animals which they wished to have killed. In 1854 I 

 began to illustrate this mode of painless death, and from that time up 

 to 1871 I never allowed the subject to rest. In 1871 I brought it for- 

 mally befoi'e the Medical Society of London. About this same time 

 I made a communication to the Royal Society for the Prevention of 

 Cruelty to Animals, and suggested a mode for killing painlessly dogs 

 and cats that were wounded in the streets. From that time I have 

 continued the inquiry, making use of all the known anaesthetic sub- 

 stances, in order to ascertain which was cheapest, most adaptable, most 

 certain in action. The information thus obtained proved very useful 

 when the time came for utilizing it. 



In undertaking the practical act of carrying out lethal death on 

 the large scale required at the Home, I had to determine, in the first 

 place, on the anaesthetic or anaesthetics to be used; and, in the second 

 place, to construct the room or chamber in which the animals should 

 be confined while exposed to the lethal gas or vapor. I have placed 

 on the wall a table of anaesthetics, including most that have up to 

 this time been discovered, with a general outline of their respective 

 properties and values. There is, you see, a goodly list, twenty-two 

 in all. Out of these I selected, as shown by experiment to be the best, 

 four : Carbonic oxide, chloroform, carbon bisulphide, coal-gas. 



Carbonic Oxide. — I was led to carbonic oxide, not only by reading 

 of it, and by witnessing the effects of it as a poison when it has been 

 breathed from coke-fumes, but specially from studying its action when. 



* Abstract from " Journal of the Society of Arts." 

 VOL. XXTI. — 41 



