6 
ROBERT MEADE SMITH. 
The only course open to us is to prove to our honest and un¬ 
prejudiced opponents that they have been imposed upon by the 
exaggerated statements of professional agitators. This we can 
do by answering the ever recurring question: What good has 
been gained by experiments on animals? I will not attempt to 
prove to you—what society to-day does not hesitate to admit— 
that to apply animals to purposes useful to man is one of the 
manifest ends of their mutual relationship on earth ; or that almost 
every advance in our knowledge of the workings of the human 
body has been gained through vivisection. 
Enough has been written in this controversy to demonstrate 
beyond question that the present status of physiology is almost 
entirely due to well-directed experiments on animals. What I 
wish to-day particularly to call attention to, is the fact that the 
condition of our domestic animals has been largely improved by 
the very same means. 
Whatever improves our capabilities for curing or preventing 
human disease is nearly always capable of application to the 
treatment of diseases of animals; for the art of medicine is one, 
whether applied to man or to the lower animals. There¬ 
fore every advance in physiology, surgery, toxicology or phar¬ 
macology may ultimately, even if not immediately, serve to im¬ 
prove the condition of the very animals at whose expense they 
were attained. No attempt, however, will be here made to show 
how experiments on the lower animals have advanced our knowl¬ 
edge of any of the above branches of the science of medicine; 
that has been already done over and over again, and the results 
of those experiments are, or should be, so well known that to 
contest them is to lay one’s self open to the charge of profound 
ignorance of a subject on which no diffidence is shown in the ex¬ 
pression of opinion; or to the equally serious charge of wilful 
blindness. All that I will at present attempt to show is that 
animals themselves have been benefitted by such studies. 
When we artificially produce a disease in animals we are only 
imitating the process of nature; but we produce the disordered 
state of the system in such a way that we are able to follow the 
various steps of the process much more accurately than is possi- 
