[1] Extracts from letter to Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, April, 1895.
Such is the memory which Be'rnard has left for posterity. It was by useless cruelty that he impressed. And no American physiologist, sounding the praises of free and unrestricted vivisection, has ever yet ventured to criticize or to condemn either the man or his work.
Let us go back a little. By the year 1871, the agitation had gone so far as to be deemed worthy of consideration by the leading scientific body in Great Britain. At the meeting of the British Association in Liverpool of that year, a committee was appointed to consider the subject of animal experimentation, and the result of their deliberations appears in the annual report. Regarding the practice, they suggest four recommendations or rules:
"1. No experiment which can be done under the influence of an anaesthetic ought to be done without it.
"2. No painful experiment is justifiable for the mere purpose of illustrating a law or fact already determined; in other words, experimentation without the employment of anaesthetics is not a fitting exhibition for teaching purposes."
A third rule suggested that painful experiments should only be made in laboratories under proper regulation; and a fourth rule condemned veterinary operations for the purpose of obtaining manual dexterity. It was evidently an attempt to allay agitation—there were no means of enforcing the recommendations concerning practices which the law did not touch.
One of the signers was Dr. Burdon Sanderson, a Lecturer on Physiology. Early the following year he began the delivery of a course of lectures in the physiological laboratory of University College in London, illustrated by vivisections. During one of these discourses, the lecturer made the following statement of his views:
"With respect to what are called `vivisections,' I assure you that I have as great a horror of them as any members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The rules in respect to them are these: First, no experiment that can be done under the influence of an anaesthetic ought to be done without it. Secondly, no PAINFUL experiment is justifiable for the mere purpose of illustrating a law or fact already demonstrated. Thirdly, whenever for the investigation of new truth, it is necessary to make a painful experiment, every effort should be made to insure success, in order that the suffering inflicted may not be wasted. For the question of cruelty depends not on the amount of suffering, but on its relation to the good to be attained by it."[1]
[1] Medical Times and Gazette, February 25, 1871.
The lecturer contended that no experiment should be performed by an unskilled person with insufficient instruments, and argued, therefore, in favour of the establishment of Physiological Laboratories, equipped with all modern devices and instruments for vivisection.