[1] See "Pie`ces Originales des Process fait a Robert Franc,ois Damiens, Paris," 1757, vol. iii., pp. 379-409; and Perkin's "France under Louis XV.," vol. ii., p. 87.
I have quoted at length three cases of judicial torture, occurring among Christian nations, which were then in the front rank of modern civilization. In Turkey and in Egypt, in India and in China, among the savage Sioux and Iroquois of North America, the tragedies of prolonged torment were more frequent, but not more horrible. But in what way do such records of torture concern the abuses of vivisection?
For two reasons they are suggestive. Not infrequently it is intimated that reports of cruelty by physiologists cannot be true: they are merely "blood-curdling stories"; their horror makes the charge beyond the possibility of belief. A physiologist cannot have been so cruel, and yet have seemed so gentle, so benevolent, so mild. Here are presented the records of torment inflicted upon human beings; torments approved by the highest legal authorities; torments to the supervision of which even medical science, in one case at least, lent its representatives to assist the torturers, and if the facts were not so well attested, they, too, would pass belief. But we know they are not fictions; they were actualities. To push them out of recollection into forgetfulness is to unlearn one of the chief lessons that History can teach us—the lesson of warning. The atrocities of biological experimentation can no more be dismissed with a shrug of incredulity than one can sneer at the agonies of Gerard or Damiens because they, too, suggest a heartlessness in the men of that time which our finer civilization can hardly conceive.
But the chief lesson of this black chapter of history concerns the great question of utility. That these atrocious torments were inspired simply and solely by an intense passion for revenge is an immeasurably dishonouring imputation. For the statesmen not only, but the religious leaders of that period, believed—and justly believed—in the usefulness of public torture; they believed that the fear of an ignominious and horrible death amid the jeering cries of the surrounding populace would tend to hinder others from repeating the offence. The utility of Terror as a deterrent they knew—as France knew it in '93, as the Spanish Inquisition knew it for nearly three centuries, as every nation knew it in times of popular insurrection or foreign wars. What Civilization came at last to recognize was that UTILITY OF TORTURE, NO MATTER HOW GREAT, COULD NOT JUSTIFY ITS USE. This principle in its application to the punishment of human beings has been universally recognized by every civilized nation in the world. It only remains for the future Civilization to recognize it so far as concerns beings inferior to ourselves. The repetition by students in a laboratory of an experiment upon the nervous system of a dog, simply to demonstrate well-known facts, tends, perhaps, to fix them in memory; but that degree of utility does not justify the torture. "The time will come," said Dr. Bigelow of Harvard Medical School, "when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of Science as it now does to burning at the stake in the name of Religion."
CHAPTER VII
THE COMMENCEMENT OF AGITATION
The student of history, attempting to trace the agitation for reform of vivisection, is early confronted by a curious fact. It is the ignorance which generally prevails concerning the part borne by the medical profession in exciting public attention to the cruelties of experimentation. The present generation of scientific teachers, of medical students and physicians, are as a rule profoundly ignorant of the beginning of the controversy, and would be as surprised as Professor Osler of Oxford University seems to have been surprised, to hear that medical journals first made known to the world the abuses of vivisection. Remembering how vigorously the physiological laboratory of to-day resists and resents either investigation or criticism, one is forced to confess that rarely, if ever, in the history of the world has a transformation of ideals been more completely attained. If the followers of Wilberforce and Clarkson, to whom the world is indebted for the great impulse against negro slavery, were to-day organized for the exploitation of the negroes on the Congo, or the Indians on the Amazon, or for carrying on the slave-trade secretly, without restriction or supervision, the condition of affairs could hardly be more singular than the dominance obtained by the physiological laboratory upon the medical conscience of to-day. The facts constitute a remarkable chapter of human experience; and though once before they have been stated by the present writer, it is evident, by the evidence given before the Royal Commission, that a vast amount of ignorance yet remains to be dispelled.
Up to a period considerably beyond the middle of the last century, the sentiment of the medical profession in England was practically unanimous in condemning the methods of vivisection which prevailed on the Continent of Europe. In 1855 the science of bacteriology was unknown. It is possible that not more than half a dozen English physiologists at that time were making experiments on living animals. It was not even regarded as an essential in the teaching of medical schools. In 1875 some of the most distinguished surgeons and physicians of Great Britain testified before the Royal Commission that as medical students they had never witnessed an experiment on a living animal.
That the agitation against the cruelties of vivisectors which made itself evident during the last half of the previous century had no origin in ignorance is easily demonstrated. It was the medical journals of England which first made known to the world the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Science in Continental laboratories. In our own day, when some of the leading teachers in medical schools have only scorn for those who denounce cruelty in the laboratory, it is worth while to study the sentiments of an earlier generation, when sympathy for animal suffering was not a subject for mockery.
The Medical Times and Gazette of London was one of the earlier of medical journals to denounce the cruelties perpetrated by vivisection abroad. In its issue of September 4, 1858, the editor says: