An abhorrence of pain was a marked trait in Dr. Bigelow's character. Even to the infliction of necessary suffering he had an extreme dislike. His gentleness to animals was akin to his tenderness for children. He had a great respect for their intelligence, their affection, their confidence in mankind. Toward the close of life he had among his pets a number of the little animals most closely related to human beings, and therefore the most-prized "material" of the vivisector. But such was Dr. Bigelow's sympathy with his little friends that he disliked to take visitors into their presence, and when he did, always cautioned them to assume a smiling face. He was unwilling to give his pets even the mental suffering of anxiety or fear.
He died October 30, 1890, at the ripe age of seventy-two. It was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself illustrious in science and in literature, who referred to the name of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow as "one of the brightest in the annals of American surgery, not to claim for it A STILL HIGHER PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE HEALING ART."
Such a tribute was well deserved. His was the most eminent name in the annals of American surgery. It was from this man, occupying such a position in the medical profession, that we have one of the strongest protests, one of the clearest, most discriminating, and emphatic criticisms of unregulated and unrestricted vivisection that the world has known. It is particularly valuable, because Dr. Bigelow was never an antivivisectionist, if by that term we mean one who is opposed to all experiments upon animals. But there are things done in the name of Science which he utterly repudiated and condemned as cruelty, and against which he made a protest that should never be forgotten until the evil shall be condemned by the universal judgment of mankind.
It is probable that Dr. Bigelow's first protest against the abuses of vivisection was in course of an address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1871. It is not difficult, perhaps, to detect the reason for its utterance. Dr. H. P. Bowditch, for very many years afterward the professor of physiology in Harvard Medical School, graduated in 1868 from that institution, and went abroad to study physiology in Europe. There he remained about three years, and on his return in 1871 he was given the opportunity of introducing laboratory methods and all the newer processes of experimentation into Harvard Medical School. Now, the address from which the following extracts are taken was delivered on May 7, 1871. Perhaps the inference is not an unreasonable one that Dr. Bigelow was here protesting, and protesting in vain, against the introduction in America of those methods of vivisection which he always regarded with abhorrence and detestation.
In this address he says:
"The teacher of the art of healing has no more right to employ the time of the ignorant student disproportionately in the pleasant and seductive paths of laboratory experimentation—because some of these may one day lead to pathology or therapeutics—than a guardian has to invest the money of his ward in stocks or securities of equally uncertain prospective value to him.
"How few facts of immediate considerable value to our race have of late years been extorted from the dreadful sufferings of dumb animals, the cold-blooded cruelties now more and more practised under the authority of science!
"The horrors of vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present value to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium, perhaps to be confuted the next year, perhaps to remain a fixed truth of immediate value,— … CONTEMPTIBLY SMALL COMPARED WITH THE PRICE PAID FOR IT IN AGONY AND TORTURE.
"For every inch cut by one of these experimenters in the quivering tissues of the helpless dog or rabbit or guinea-pig, let him insert a lancet one-eighth of an inch into his own skin, and for every inch more he cuts let him advance the lancet another one-eight of an inch; and whenever he seizes, with ragged forceps, a nerve or spinal marrow, the seat of all that is concentrated and exquisite in agony, or literally tears out nerves by their roots, let him cut only one-eight of an inch farther—and he may have some faint suggestion of the atrocity he is perpetrating when the guinea-pig shrieks, the poor dog yells, the noble horse groans and strains—the heartless vivisector perhaps resenting the struggle which annoys him.
"My heart sickens as I recall the spectacle at Alfort in former times, of a wretched horse—one of many hundreds, broken with age and disease resulting from life-long and honest devotion to man's service—bound upon the floor, his skin scored with a knife like a gridiron, his eyes and ears cut out, his arteries laid bare, his nerves exposed and pinched and severed, his hoofs pared to the quick, and every conceivable and fiendish torture inflicted upon him, while he groaned and gasped, his life carefully preserved under this continued and hellish torment from early morning until afternoon, for the purpose, as was avowed, of familiarizing the pupil with the frenzied motions of the animal. This was surgical vivisection on a little larger scale, AND TRANSCENDED BUT LITTLE THE SCENES IN A PHYSIOLOGICAL LABORATORY. I have heard it said that somebody must do it. I say it is needless. NOBODY SHOULD DO IT. WATCH THE STUDENTS AT A VIVISECTION; IT IS THE BLOOD AND SUFFERING, not the science, that rivet their breathless attention. If hospital service makes young students less tender of suffering, vivisection deadens their humanity, and begets indifference to it."