One of the most deadly sins of men has been cruelty, cruelty to animals, to children, to women, to men. The basest of these forms is in some respects cruelty to animals, since animals are so thoroughly committed into our hands. It is not easy to devise a more hardening process than careless vivisection; and the claim that it is done in the name of knowledge is, unless it is profoundly and deeply true, an aggravation of the offence. Inhumanity is the worst possible temper for the medical profession to entertain, and the worst possible suspicion to attach to them. If the physicians cannot approach all suffering with an intense desire to relieve it, he is not true to his calling. It is with more or less fear that the defenceless human subject is committed to them lest they should make of him an experiment.
JOHN BASCOM.
Williamstown,
December 15, 1902.
APPENDIX V
Among American physicians, probably the most distinguished medical writer of to-day is Dr. George M. Gould, author of several medical works, and formerly editor of various medical journals. His opposition to antivivisection ideals has always been pronounced; but it has not prevented recognition of the abuses of the unlimited practice of animal experimentation. Some extracts from an address delivered by Dr. Gould before the American Academy of Medicine are here presented. The reader should understand that they are extracts only, and that they represent but one aspect of the speaker's views. Perhaps they are the more valuable in that they are the utterances of the most pronounced American critic of antivivisection of the present time.
THE LIMITATIONS AND ERRORS OF THE VIVISECTIONISTS
The first that strikes one is an exaggeration of the importance and extent of the vivisection method. As valuable an aid as it is, it is not the only, and perhaps it is not the chief, method of ascertaining medical truth. It has without doubt often been used when other methods would have been productive of more certain results. This has arisen from what a large and broad culture of the human mind perceives to flow from a recent and rather silly hypertrophy of the scientific method, and a limitation of that method to altogether too material or physical aspects of the problem….
Almost every point over which the controversy has raged most fiercely has been in relation to one or all of the three or four questions:
1. What is a vivisection experiment? 2. By whom should it be performed? 3. For what purpose should it be performed? 4. By what methods should it be carried out?
In reference to all of these questions, scientific men should unite and establish a common set of principles or answers. In my judgment their failure to do so at all, and besides this, their frequent exaggeration of logical limits and just calims, has been one of the unfortunate causes of useless and wasteful wrangling…..