There is no need of completing the description. It was an experiment absolutely useless and without justification. We may confess that we read of such useless cruelties of experiment only with infinite disgust.
No matter how careful a writer may be, it is very rare that he escapes, from unfriendly readers, the imputation of inaccuracy. Against writers of history—men like Froude, Macaulay, or Carlyle—the same charge has been made. But a critic whose microscopic eye discerns inaccuracy in others should be very careful to make no similar errors himself. The mistake upon which he has dwelt, was due to reliance upon the translation of another man. It may be of interest to point out that in his own writings Dr. Keen has made a precisely similar mistake; and that although it was pointed out and its untruth confessed many years ago, yet the false imputation appears again in the pages of his book, without correction or intimation of its utter untruth, on the page where it firs tis given to the reader of to-day.
In a pamphlet published during the closing years of the last century by the American Humane Association, there appeared a strong condemnation of experiments made by a Dr. Sanarelli, apparently upon hospital patients, temporarily under his care. In an Italian periodical, the young scientist described his researches with remarkable frankness. He tells of the various symptoms of yellow fever, which by his serum he had caused his victims to suffer—the congestions, the haemorrhage, the delirium, the fatty degeneration, the collapse; and all these, he adds, "I have seen unrolled before my eyes, THANKS TO THE POTENT INFLUENCE OF THE YELLOW-FEVER POISON MADE IN MY LABORATORY."
So terrible a confession of human vivisection, it was eemed best by some English translator to suppress; and in various medical journals, both in England and America, the sentence here italicized did not appear. Finding it quoted only by the pamphlet that condemned human vivisection, Dr. Keen, without consulting the original, made the dishonouring imputation that perhaps it had been "DELIBERATELY ADDED" by some one of his opponents, and this, too, notwithstanding he had referred to the original authority where the words were to be found. "Unfortunately," he explained at a later period, "I am not an Italian scholar, and have never even seen Sanarelli's original article"; he had placed dependence for his statement upon a "friend."[1] Who could have been this "friend" who pretended that he had read the article of Sanarelli in the original, and deceived him into making a charge of forgery, for the truth of which there was not a particle of foundation? But the thing of which his readers have a right to complain is not that his "friend" deceived him, for that may happen to anyone. It is this: that the imputation of forgery, the untruth of which was admitted long ago, still remains in the essay where it first appeared, and without there being the slightest disclaimer of the false insinuation. Let the reader turn to p. 125 of the work under review. There is the suggestion that Sanarelli's allusion to the poisons fabricated in his laboratory may have been "DELIBERATELY ADDED"—an imputation of forgery. WHERE ON THIS PAGE, IN THE TEXT OR BY FOOTNOTE, HAS THE AUTHOR WITHDRAWN THAT INSINUATION? IT CANNOT BE FOUND.
[1] "Animal Experimentation," pp. 143-144.
II.
One of the most serious offences against literacy accuracy which this writer has apparently committed appears in the garbling of the opinions of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow of Harvard University, on the subject of vivisection. The case is of especial interest not only because the facts are so clear, but because they bring into relief certain methods of controversy, which by some seem to be regarded as entirely justifiable.
A sketch of the life of Dr. Bigelow, with extended quotations from his writings, will be found in the ninth chapter of the work now in the reader's hands. The opinions there expressed regarding vivisection are by no means extreme. No past writer on this subject has left behind him more abundant evidence of his position in this controversy. It was not animal experimentation that he condemned, but the cruelty that sometimes accompanies it, and to which, if vivisection be unregulated by law, it is so often liable.
How may the views of such a writer be attacked after he is in his grave? A physiological casuist would suggest, for instance, that although for forty years connected with a medical school, Dr. Bigelow really knew little or nothing about vivisection except what he had chanced to see in France, although his writings abound with allusions indicative of familiarity with laboratory scenes. It might be asserted, indeed, that "in his later life," the great advocate of reform had changed his views; and as a fair exposition of the new attitude, a brief warning against confounding a painful with a painless experiment would be quoted, after eliminating from the paragraph anything that referred to cruelty or abuse.
Is not this exactly what the author of "Animal Experimentation" has done in his attempt to discredit the weight of Dr. Bigelow's protests? He tells his readers that "the opponents of research" quote the Harvard professor's earliest utterances "based on the suffering he saw at Alfort," but that they carefully omit this expression of his later opinions: