March 30, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



425 



Oalen, who seventeen centuries ago proved 

 by vivisections, against his professional op- 

 ponents, that blood is naturally contained 

 in the arteries. 



Of the numerous improvements in prac- 

 tical medicine and surgery which are the 

 outcome of experiments upon living animals 

 we could not speak at length without ex- 

 panding a brief statement into a book. We 

 will instance further only the vivisections 

 by which, at the time of the Napoleonic 

 wars. Dr. J. F. D. Jones ascertained the 

 proper way to tie up a wounded artery, and 

 thereby afforded the means to military and 

 civU practice of saving very numerous pa- 

 tients from bleeding to death ; the experi- 

 ments of the still living surgeon. Sir Joseph 

 Lister, as the result of which surgery has 

 been revolutionized in our own day; the 

 quite recent vivisections, as the result of 

 which the cure of the disease called myxce- 

 dema has been discovered, which cure con- 

 sists in the administration or transplanta- 

 tion of the thyroid gland; and the vivisec- 

 tions in the seventeenth century relating to 

 the transfusion of blood, as the result of 

 which women in child-bed have repeatedly 

 been rescued from impending death from 

 ' flooding after delivery.' 



Experience shows, therefore, that it is 

 impossible to disentangle pure science from 

 applied science; that vital human interests 

 are benefited by ' scientific curiosity,' as 

 well as by work more directly practical; 

 and that this general law holds good for 

 those sciences, pure and applied, which 

 deal with man as such, and with the other 

 living things upon the earth. Without 

 physiology, pathology and their allies, 

 which investigate the laws of life by experi- 

 ments upon living creatures, practical medi- 

 cine would be in worse than mediaeval 

 plight ; for before the Middle Ages the 

 genius of the Greeks had inaugurated the 

 practice of experimental physiology, with 

 results of value for all time. 



Therefore, the use of animals by man- 

 kind for scientific purposes take its place 

 beside those other uses of them for the good 

 of man which involve imprisonment, en- 

 forced labor, death, and, in some cases, suf- 

 fering. That society asserts with practical 

 unanimity the right to kill and inflict pain 

 upon animals for its own purposes is shown 

 by the legal view of cruelty as the unjus- 

 tifiable infliction of suffering. Were every 

 infliction of pain as such punishable as 

 cruel, the painful operations, for instance, 

 required to make animals docile, or to fit 

 them to be food, would be abolished. In 

 every great civUized country these opera- 

 tions of the farmyard aggregate millions 

 in each year. 



Happily, of the very various procedures 

 known collectively as vivisections, many 

 are painless; in others the suffering is triv- 

 ial, whether the animal be killed or remain 

 alive; and in the great majority of the rest 

 some drug may be given to quiet pain, or 

 insensibility may be produced by sudden 

 operation. There remains, however, a 

 limited portion of cases, which may be of 

 great importance, where the results of ex- 

 periment would be endangered by any 

 means that could be taken against suffering. 

 In these cases the animal must suffer, 

 though often far less than would be sup- 

 posed, for the benefit of nian as does the 

 gelded horse or the wounded game. 



Common sense requires, therefore, that 

 investigations in biology and medicine shall 

 proceed, at the expense, when necessary, of 

 the death and suffering of animals. If 

 these sciences are not to be extinguished 

 they must be transmitted from generation 

 to generation; they must -be taught, and 

 like all the other natural or physical sci- 

 ences; they must, at institutions of the 

 higher learning be taught by demonstration. 

 No one would think favorably of a student 

 of chemistry who had never handled a test- 

 tube, or of a student of electricity who had 



