SECTION 1. That hereafter no person shall make upon any human being any scientific, medical or surgical experiment or operation, EXCEPT FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE PERSON EXPERIMENTED UPON, unless the intelligent, personal consent of such latter person shall previously have been obtained. Every such consent, to be valid, must be in writing and must be preceded by a full and correct written statement setting forth to the person whose consent is sought whatever painful, injurious or dangerous consequences are obviously liable to result from the proposed experimentation, and such statement shall be signed both by the experimenter and the person to be experimented upon.
SECTION 2. That experiments or operation of this nature shall be undertaken only by one of the responsible head-physicians or surgeons of some hospital or public instiution or by his special written authorization; provided only that nothing herein contained shall apply to scientific investigations incapable of causing injury, made by direction of authorities in charge of any institution of learning, upon students, with their consent, for the purpose of testing acuteness of mental action, or for the purpose of investigating other mental or physical phenomena.
SECTION 3. That no scientific, medical or surgical experiment of any kind, liable to cause pain or distress or injury to health or danger to life, shall be permissible under any circumstances upon any new-born babe, or upon any infirm or aged or feeble-minded person, or upon anyone whose mental faculties are impaired, either temporarily or permanently, or upon any woman during pregnancy or within a year after her confinement, or upon any child under fifteen years of age, unless it be undertaken for the sole benefit of the person to be experimented upon; and the consent of any such person to any such experiment or operation shall not constitute such legal consent as is required by this act, but shall be null and void.
SECTION 4. That the responsible head of any hospital or public institution, in which any experiment or operation of any kinds mentioned in Section 1 of this Act shall have been made, shall on or before the first day of February in each year make a written report, attested by oath, to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia of all such experiments and operations that shall have been made in such hospital or public institution during the calendar year next preceding, which report shall contain copies of the statements and of the consents required by said Section 1, together with detailed accounts of such experiments and operations and the results thereof; and such reports shall be printed annually.
SECTION 5. That any person who authorizes, performs or assists in performing an experiment or operation in violation of any provision of this Act shall be liable, upon conviction, to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000) and shall thereafter be incapable of legally engaging in the practice of medicine in the District of Columbia or in any territory under the jurisdiction of the United States, and of holding any official position of any kind under the Government of the United States
SECTION 6. That all sections of this Act shall be applicable to the District of Columbia and to all other territory under the jurisdiction or military control of the United States.
APPENDIX VII
SCIENTIFIC OPINIONS
A few years ago, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D., a Fellow of the Royal Society and a distinguished sanitarian, was asked to express his opinion regarding experiments upon animals. He was a member of the medical profession; for some years he had been a lecturer on physiology in a medical school; he had been a practical experimenter, and his discoveries of new agents and methods for the prouction of anaesthesia had given him a high place in the scientific world. His reply to a series of questions was embodied in a volume entitled: "Biological Experimentation; its Function and Limits." Certain extracts from this work,—in some cases slightly abbreviated,—are here given. They are of special value, as the views of an eminent physician, a scientific discoverer, and a practical physiologist. ——————————- If in creation there was no pain, if no pain could be extorted except by a physiologist, a physiologist inflicting pain, even for the cure of disease would be an accepted criminal by the general voice of mankind. But Nature is a laboratory of pain on the most gigantic scale; she stands at nothing in the way of infliction, spares nothing that is sentient. She inflicts pain for her own purposes, and she keeps it going…. If man inflicted such painful diseases as Nature inflicts, he would be a monster. Man rebels against these inflictions. Shall he add to pain by his rebellion? ——————————- In Science, there is no one method that can be considered indispensable. Attributes are indispensable; observation, industry, accuracy are indispensable; methods are not. Methods may be convenient, they may be useful, they may be expedient, but nothing more. Celsus tells us that Erasistratus and the school he founded laid open the bodies of criminals in order to study by direct observation, the action of the intestinal organs during existence. The act at that date of civilization probably shocked no one; it was no doubt in accord with the spirit of the time. In a day not very remote from our own, a criminal sentenced to death for some trivial crime, was given over to William Cheselden, surgeon to George the First, for experiment. The criminal was deaf and the experiment intended was that of making a puncture through the drum of the ear, in order to discover if an opening through the drum would enable the deaf to hear. At the last moment, Cheselden, a man of fine feeling, and brilliant as an operating surgeon, declined the experiment, on which the criminal, whose life had been conditionally spared, was set free. For his generosity of mind, for shrinking from an experiment on another human being, Cheselden lost caste at Court, and was considered pitiable by those who lived on courtly favours.
The argument is taking now the same direction against experiments by man conducted on the lower animals for the purposes of discovery; and when from the history of the past we gather what has been achieved by such experiments, there is but one answer—namely: that such experiments, although they may achieve what was expected of them, were not indispensable. They may have expedited discovery; they may have led to discovery; but they were not indispensable. ——————————- In the discovery of anaesthesia, general and local, painful experiment on animals has played no indispensable part whatever.