THE VIVISECTION QUESTION. 



7^1 



three laboratories in this country and a number of the leading 

 laboratories abroad, I have never had occasion to perform or wit- 

 ness an experiment of this painful class. Discovery of new anees- 

 thetics and more recent methods of operation have doubtless re- 

 duced the pain of experimentation even below Yeo's estimate. In 

 all laboratories in this country, and equally abroad, I have always 

 found anaesthetics adequately and uniformly employed. 



In the recent discussions before the House Judiciary Com- 

 mittee of Massachusetts upon the bill relating to inspection of 

 vivisectional experiments in the medical schools and universities 

 of the State, none of the petitioners for the bill were able to cite 

 a single case, or the reasonable suspicion of a case, of abuse of 

 vivisection, as having occurred within the State of Massachusetts, 

 In order to obtain as reliable data as x^ossible upon this point, I 

 sent blank tables, arranged according to the table below, to all 

 the laboratories in Massachusetts where vivisectional experiments 

 were likely to be made. Returns were kindly sent in from all the 

 laboratories, and may safely be taken to represent the experi- 

 mental work in the State during the year 1894:-'95. 



Contrast with this the 34,419 human beings who die of disease 

 annually in Massachusetts. 



A general principle underlying vivisectional work is also re- 

 vealed in the table, viz., that the lowest animal adequate for the 

 purposes of the research be employed in preference to one more 

 highly organized. This entirely negatives an assumption often 

 advanced that animal vivisection tends toward human vivisec- 

 tion. The whole tendency of modern physiology has been exactly 

 the reverse. Animals have come to be used in order to save 

 human beings from abuse.* In the very beginning of medicine 



* Tlie recent action of Dr. J. S. Pyle (A Plea for the Appropriation of Criminals con- 

 demned to Capital Punishment to the Experimental Physiologist, Canton, Ohio, 1893), so 



