PROLEGOMENA 3 



body, in order that he may know how to set right the acci- 

 dents, perversions, and premature decay to which human flesh 

 is prone, would remain an empiric of the most rigid type did 

 he not apply to the elucidation of his problems all conclusions 

 reached from the study of other organisms which are likely to 

 prove pertinent. There would be no science of human physi- 

 ology had observation and experiment been limited to Man. 

 There would be no science of medicine, it may be added, had not 

 the mode of working of the human body, and the influence of 

 drugs upon it, been inferred from the results of experiments 

 upon animals experiments which could never have been made 

 upon men. Blisters, blood-letting, mercury-poisoning, would 

 still be the physician's remedies for all human ills. " Give 

 the watch a good shaking. It sometimes does good. If that 

 fails, I cannot advise you what to do, as I know nothing about 

 the working of a watch." Even though we open the living 

 human body, as must be done for the purpose of making good 

 such defects as are amenable to surgical treatment, and for a 

 little while observe its wheels go round, we are unable, from 

 fear of damaging the wheels, to introduce the mechanical 

 tests which would tell us how and why they revolve. The 

 man must be allowed to recover with uninjured organs. But, 

 thanks to anaesthetics, there is no test which may not be applied 

 to a live animal with as much propriety as to a dead one. 

 Anaesthetics abolish the distinction, in its ethical applications, 

 between life and death, because we are under no obligation, as 

 in the case of the human being, to allow an animal to recover. 

 Many experiments upon animals will be recorded in this book, 

 and since the book is intended for the general public, who have 

 been singularly misled regarding the nature and methods of 

 vivisection, an opportunity is taken thus early of insisting that 

 anaesthetics have made all things, not only possible, but 

 legitimate. It is unnecessary to commence the description of 

 each experiment with the statement that the animal was first 

 placed in a condition of complete anaesthesia, or to end it 

 with the statement that it was destroyed before it had re- 

 covered from the effects of the anaesthetic. The reader may 

 take these facts for granted. In discussing the propriety of 

 operating upon a living but unconscious animal, we are playing 

 a word game as old as Plato's day. What is life ? What is 



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