614 
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
The regard for the feelings of our patients which the 
exhibition of pain-removing means implies, cannot fail also to 
tell favorably upon the progress of our science. 
The mind-world is moving on in this respect, and there 
is a distinct public opinion arising against the practice of 
unnecessary vivisection in the schools of medicine. The time 
has been, and perhaps still exists, when experiments upon 
living horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, and the like, w 7 ere instituted 
week after week, and session after session, not to discover 
anything new, not to gain any fresh access to the secrets of 
nature (for one or two such experiments would have sufficed 
for that), but simply to demonstrate to fresh students the 
effects of <c cutting and maiming” these living and writhing 
creatures. Gentlemen, allow me to protest, in your name 
and my own, against all attempts to raise up schools of 
vivisection. The act is an abomination to all our most en- 
lightened feelings ; a torpor and a darkness extinguishing 
our best sources of knowledge ; in short, it is arrant and hor- 
rible Sepoyism wearing the mask of art and science. Public 
opinion only requires to be directed to the subject to render 
such practices impossible, and justly to punish the perpe- 
trators. I am speaking of the public repetition of vivisection, 
or, in plain Saxon, the cutting up of creatures alive. 
If any scientific man, brought to a stand-still by other 
modes of investigation, finds it necessary to cut up a living 
body, let him first chloroform the flesh he is about to violate, 
and trust to his conscience for an acquittal. Let him report 
his results ; but let him not repeatedly, and before sus- 
ceptible young men, score deeply into nerve, brain, muscle, 
and the vital organs of the frame, as if they were but a 
black insensate board for his fantastic cruelties to design 
upon. This institution, as the fountain-head of the animal 
sciences for these realms, ought to be the guardian of the 
claims of the domesticated animals, and humanity should be 
written in broad capitals over its doorway. Here we can 
tolerate none of the horrors which have disgraced some of 
the Continental schools — none of that cruelty which, in the 
art of healing, has grinned like a demon from behind a mask. 
Would you believe it? in France, before chloroform was used, 
they taught the students surgery by requiring them to perform 
all the leading operations upon living horses — upon horses 
which required no such operations, but were given up for the 
purpose by the Government. Imagine a poor animal, hour 
after hour, with hacked flesh and quivering sinew, uttering 
dumb groans to deaf hearts, then taken back to his oats for 
next day's fete of steel. These are the cruel acts of 
