July 24, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



91 



posed legislation. Shortly after the close 

 of the hearings the committee presented a 

 unanimous report recommending '' that the 

 petitioners have leave to withdraw." 



Having thus called your attention to a few 

 salient points in the history of the anti- vivi- 

 section movement and indicated the meth- 

 ods employed by the leaders of this crusade 

 against the work of a profession whose glory 

 is to save, let me next ask you to consider 

 the reasons which not only justify students 

 of medical science in resorting to experi- 

 ments upon living animals, but require 

 them to do so as a necessary condition of 

 any important advance. 



In dealing with this question I shall 

 make free use of a work entitled ' Physio- 

 logical Cruelty, or Fact vs. Fancy, by Phil- 

 anthropes.' This book, which appeared in 

 1883, contains by far the most comprehen- 

 sive, logical and dispassionate discussion of 

 the subject with which I am acquainted. 



The vivisection question reduced to its 

 simplest expression may be stated as fol- 

 lows : " Have we a right to give pain to 

 animals in order to study the phenomena of 

 life ? " In answering this question we per- 

 ceive at once the necessity of a clear con- 

 ception of what pain really is, and in striv- 

 ing to obtain this conception we are struck 

 by the fact that pain is a purely subjective 

 phenomenon. We know absolutely nothing 

 about pain, except that which we have our- 

 selves suffered. We infer, of course, when 

 we hear another person describe a painful 

 sensation, that his feelings are similar in a 

 general way to those which we imagine we 

 ourselves should experience under like cir- 

 cumstances. This assumption of similarity 

 of sensation is justified by the facts of our 

 common human nature; but we are often 

 struck, when listening to such descriptions, 

 by the apparent difference between the im- 

 pressions produced upon different individ- 

 uals by the same external cause. A trifling 

 surgical operation, which will not be con- 



sidered worth mentioning by one individ- 

 ual, will, to another, be apparently the 

 source of most acute suffering. We are 

 thus led to suspect that, even in the circle 

 of our own acquaintances, there must be 

 quite a wide range of sensibility to pain. 

 If we extend our observation over a wider 

 field, we find reason to believe that in the 

 human race there is a certain rough pro- 

 portionality between sensibility to pain and 

 intellectual development. A case is re- 

 corded, for instance, of a Eussian serf who, 

 while splitting logs in a forest, was caught 

 by the thumb in the crack of a large log 

 from which the wedge had unexpectedly 

 flown out. He tore himself free from his 

 painful imprisonment, as a wild animal 

 might have done, leaving the thumb in the 

 log, with the long tendons of the forearm 

 still attached to it. It is doubtful if a more 

 civilized man could have subjected himself 

 to this operation, even with the alternative 

 before him of an indefinite imprisonment in 

 the forest. The cruel tortures which sav- 

 ages inflict upon their friends and them- 

 selves, as in the initiation rites of the Man- 

 dan warriors, seem to be best explained on 

 the supposition that their sensibility to pain 

 is less acute than that of civilized races. 



In the case of the lower animals the evi- 

 dence of a low sensibility to pain is much 

 more conclusive. Among our domestic ani- 

 mals the horse and dog are commonly re- 

 garded as standing nearest to man in intel- 

 ligence and sensibility, and yet nearly 

 everyone who has had much to do with 

 these animals will recall instances of great 

 indifference shown by them to what would 

 be to us severe pain. A single illustration 

 of this insensibility may suffice. A horse 

 whose leg was badly broken was sentenced 

 to be shot, but during the two hours which 

 intervened between the sentence and the 

 execution the animal limped about to 

 graze, dragging the fractured limb dangling 

 behind it in a way which would have 



