740 
An American View of the [December, 
England were placarded with large figures of dissections of 
dead animals, accompanied by printed words designed to 
entrap the general public into the belief that they repre- 
sented vivisections of living creatures ; when a text-book of 
practical physiology, designed only for special students of 
physiology, was represented far and wide as intended for use 
by every crude medical student ; when the faCt that the 
words “ first gave an anaesthetic ” were omitted (as they are 
in text-books of surgery, the administration of an anaesthetic 
being, of course, assumed in cases where very special reasons 
for its omission do not exist) in the directions for the per- 
formance of certain operations, was used as proof that 
physiologists never thought of employing means to prevent 
or minimise pain ; when a law was passed which allows any 
one to torture a frog in the most brutal manner if he says 
he does it just because he likes it, but subjects a university 
professor to fine and imprisonment if he draws a drop of 
blood from the animal’s toe for a scientific purpose,— then it 
had certainly become time for the physicians and physiolo- 
gists of the British Isles to endeavour to inform the public 
on the vivisection question. 
The anti-viviseCtion craze has now spread to Germany, 
and there are premonitory symptoms in the United States. 
Our people in general are too well informed, and have too 
great confidence in scientific men, to be so easily led astray 
as the English have been. We shall, moreover, be free 
from the pressure of a royal court which dislikes biological 
science, and from the influence of the personal prejudices of 
the sovereign, still powerful enough in England to have 
much weight in legislation on questions outside of Whig 
and Tory politics. Still, American physiology is by no 
means secure, unless its leaders take warning by the English 
disaster* They have, in consequence of British legislation, 
an opportunity to make the United States the chief seat of 
physiological research among the English-speaking peoples; 
and it will be a lasting disgrace to them if they let it slip. 
If, while freely admitting that they believe it their duty to 
experiment on living animals, they will be on the alert to 
correct at once the falsehoods and exaggerations of the 
fanatics ; to take pains to teach the public how much the 
scientific treatment of disease depends on physiological, 
therapeutical, and pathological research ; and to make it 
widely known how very small a percentage of vivisections 
involve more pain than that felt by a man on receiving a 
hypodermic of morphia, — then there is little doubt they will 
be allowed to carry on without hindrance their beneficent 
