An Ethical Problem | Page 8

of
unthinking sentimentalists. Of that strong protest against cruel
experiments which made itself heard more during more than a century,
and of the atrocities which led to that protest, the average physician of
to-day knows nothing whatever. Plunged into the practice of a
profession which may absorb every moment of time, he has perhaps
neither leisure to investigate nor disposition to doubt whatever he has
been told.
Now, if the average student of medicine is thus ignorant of history, is it
not because those who have taught him were equally devoid of
knowledge of the facts? Of the history of the vivisection controversy
previous to 1875, some of the most distinguished men in the medical
profession have proved themselves profoundly ignorant. Illustrations of
this lack of information might be almost indefinitely adduced, but I
propose to bring forward only a few instances typical of their kind.
On June 10, 1896, Dr. Henry P. Bowditch, then professor of physiology
in Harvard Medical School, delivered an address on vivisection before
the Massachusetts Medical Society. The character of his audience, and
the profession of the speaker, might be presumed to give assurance of
absolute accuracy concerning any question of historic fact. A quarter
century before, Dr. Bowditch had studied physiology in German
laboratories Returning to America in 1871, he had been given the
opportunity of reorganizing the teaching of physiology at Harvard
Medical School, so as to bring it into conformity with Continental
methods. It is quite probable that to him, more than to any other person,
is due the introduction of Continental methods of physiological

instruction in the medical colleges of the United States.
According to Dr. Bowditch, the criticism of vivisection in England
began in 1864. To his audience of physicians he made the following
statement:
"The first serious attack upon biological research in England seems to
have been made in an essay entitled `Vivisection: is it Necessary or
Justifiable?' published in London in 1864, by George Fleming, a British
veterinary surgeon. This essay is an important one, for although
characterized at the time by a reviewer in the London Athenaeum as
`ignorant, fallacious, and altogether unworthy of acceptance,' its
blood-curdling stories, applied to all sorts of institutions, have formed a
large part of the stock-in-trade of subsequent vivisection writers."
The sneering reference to "blood-curdling stories" is of itself extremely
significant. It indicates unmistakably the utter contempt which nearly
every physiologist feels for the sentiment of humaneness which
underlies protest against experimental cruelty. The speaker omitted to
tell his audience that this essay of Dr. Fleming received the first prize
offered by the "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals," and that the Committee which decided the merits of the
essay included some of the most eminent scientific men of England,
among them Sir Richard Owen and Professor Carpenter--the latter one
of the most distinguished of English physiologists of his time. He
forgot to add that if the examples of atrocious vivisection given in this
essay were horrible--as they were--yet every instance was substantiated
by reference to the original authorities, and that their accurate quotation
could not be impugned. Especially curious is the fact that Professor
Bowditch placed the beginning of criticism at 1864. Of the arraignment
of cruel vivisections by English physicians and English medical
journals before that time, Dr. Bowditch apparently never heard, and all
the infamous atrocities which they condemned he dismissed with a
sneer as "blood-curdling stories." Yet, in his day, the speaker was one
of the leading physiologists of the United States. We cannot believe
that the suppression of material facts was intentional; it was due rather
to complete ignorance of the history of that protest against

physiological cruelty which England witnessed during the first part of
the nineteenth century, and of which some account shall follow.
Take another instance. In the International Journal of Ethics for April,
1904, there appeared an article in defence of animal experimentation by
Professor Charles S. Myers of the University of Cambridge, England.
Of any abuses of the practice, Dr. Myers gave his readers no reason for
believing that he had ever heard; and as an indication, perhaps, of an
animal's eagerness to be vivisected, he tells us that "again and again
dogs have been observed to wag the tail and lick the hands of the
operator even immediately before the beginning of the operation."
Commenting upon the singular conclusion which this fact seemed to
suggest to Dr. Myers, the present writer quoted a sentence or two from
an editorial which once appeared in the columns of the London
Lancet.[1] It would apparently seem that Dr. Myers brought the
quotation to the attention of someone in the editorial office of the
Lancet, on whose judgment he thought he might safely rely; for, in a
reply, he refers to it as