Importance of Pathology. g 



of plagues and their development. As long as these methods were 

 not' employed superstition and fear dominated mankind whenever a 

 pestilence appeared. To-day, with realization of the conditions 

 essential for infection and the modes of transmission, medical 

 acumen has determined the surest preventive measures for con- 

 trolling and combatting these diseases ; and even the worst epi- 

 demics, as of plague and cholera, have largely lost their terrors. 

 With confidence the work of extirpation is being carried forward, 

 and medical science, crowned with success, has completely stamped 

 out a number of these infections and is daily solving the difficulties 

 in the prevention and cure of such evils. 



To sympathetic persons it may indeed seem a serious thing that 

 we be forced for our own advantage to make use of the sufferings 

 of lower animals in order to avert such dangers from ourselves 

 and to purchase by animal sacrifice the means of combatting con- 

 tagion. But the instinct of self-preservation impels man, just as 

 the necessity for food with any animal demands the death of other 

 creatures. The slaughter of animals for sport is far worse, and 

 productive of more pain to them ; and many of the methods of kill- 

 ing in the kitchen of the epicure are much less excusable than any 

 of the practices in the whole range of deplored animal inoculation, 

 so unavoidable for the establishment of medical science. When it 

 is realized that without the results obtainable by such work — Ex- 

 perimental Pathology — millions of people must forever be threatened 

 by early death from pestilence, as of old, when countless numbers 

 were sufferers in these epidemics and were hurried off before their 

 time and when destructive cattle plagues forced heavy burdens 

 on the land, whole hecatombs of animals for which the experi- 

 mentalist must account must appear but a trifling matter. Prohi- 

 bition of animal experimentation, as is sought by unrestrained 

 zoomania, would be equivalent to prohibiting the cure of the sick; 

 since nature affords for many affections no means for restoration 

 other than the blood of. inoculated animals. Human education and 

 the high ethical tone of medical science will certainly be sufficient 

 security that experimental pathology in pursuit of its purposes will 

 not lend itself to useless animal torment. 



