VIVISECTION IN FRANCE. 
563 
man in perfect, cheerful healtli are exercised. Ph 3 ^sically, as 
well as morall}^, it is a fact that no reliance can be placed on 
the replies to questions addressed to one under the torture. 
With very rare exceptions—we have it on high medical 
authority—such experiments lead to fallacious results, fill the 
students mind with doubts and uncertainties, and are far 
better left alone. This is the case even when the operator 
possesses sufficient knowledge to profit to the utmost by his 
cruel practices, productive of indescribable sufferings to the 
helpless creatures subjected to them. ‘^It is for them,^^ 
Dr. Fee has written, ‘‘ a slow and despairing death, so much 
the more horrible that they cannot lose consciousness. 
Men faint away; an animal never faints, but expires in tor¬ 
ments. Certainly, under skilful hands, sparing of the blood 
of animated beings, such deaths have borne fruits. But how 
many animals, immolated by the ignorant, have displayed 
their palpitating entrails to eyes that could not see, and to 
intelligences that could not understand."’^ It has been urged 
that, if such experiments are to be made, it should be in the 
silence and retirement of the laboratory, and not in the 
dissecting school, before a crowd of spectators, as has been 
and is too frequently the case. By witnessing such cruelties 
the young and inexperienced become inured and tempted to 
practise them—without profit to themselves, and at double 
expense of suffering to the victims. It is related that when 
Dr. Segalas was giving courses of physiology, the students 
(most of whom knew but little of human anatomy, while pro¬ 
bably not one of them had a notion of comparative anatomy) 
used to steal dogs and entice cats into their lodgings, and 
repeat upon them the experiments they had witnessed the 
day before. An able medical writer, Dr. Bossu, has quite 
recently denounced the evil effect produced upon young men 
by familiarizing them with such cruelties. He declares that 
among the students, who follow the lectures of the faculty 
there are many who cannot witness with impunity the shock- 
ing sight of an animal deprived of life slowly, methodically, 
and in the most cruel sufferings. Such an ignoble spectacle 
is calculated to pervert the generous sentiments of youth, and 
it is important that it should disappear. If such things 
continue,^^ adds the editor of the ‘ Medical Bee,’— 
Future physicians will bear the impress of a cold, impla¬ 
cable insensibility, a hundred times put to the test, and conse¬ 
quently very ill adapted to render them sympathetic to their 
patients. Let none deceive themselves; to accustom a man 
to shed blood, and to render him insensible to the sufferings 
of animals, is to degrade and brutalise hina,” 
