Let us pause for a moment. These are words of great import. They are as true to-day as when first uttered. Who was the speaker? The most eminent surgeon in America in his day. He was professor of surgery in Harvard University, and the leading member of its faculty. He was the surgeon of the Massachusetts General Hospital. He had seen the first surgical operation under complete anaesthesia that the world had known. Learned societies in Paris, in London, in other countries of Europe, were proud to number him among their members. He had reached the age of assured eminence, where all fear of opposing influences that might disastrously affect the medical career of a younger man, had no weight. Surely, if any living man can speak with authority, he speaks now.
And before whom does he speak? He is not addressing a general audience. It is a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, an association of the physicians and surgeons of that Commonwealth. Some of them had also seen vivisection as practised in Paris and Leipsic. Here was a man at the head of their profession protesting against the introduction of the vivisection laboratory system in his own country.
He insists over and over again that we cannot tell the degree of agony inflicted by experiments upon the nervous system, nor measure its intensity:
"Who can say whether a guinea-pig, the pinching of whose carefully sensitized neck throws him into convulsions, attains this blessed momentary respite of insensibility by an unexplained special machinery of the nervous currents, OR A SENSIBILITY TOO EXQUISITELY ACUTE FOR ANIMAL ENDURANCE? Better that I or my friend should die than protract existence through accumulated years of torture upon animals whose exquisite suffering we cannot fail to infer, even though they may have neither voice nor feature to express it."
It is not the fact of suffering, but the useless waste of suffering that chiefly repels him:
"If a skilfully constructed hypothesis could be elaborated up to the point of experimental test by the most accomplished and successful philosopher, and if then a single experiment, though cruel, would forever settle it, we might reluctantly admit that it was justified. But the instincts of our common humanity indignantly remonstrate against the testing of clumsy or unimportant hypotheses by prodigal experimentation, or MAKING THE TORTURE OF ANIMALS AN EXHIBITION TO ENLARGE A MEDICAL SCHOOL, or for the entertainment of students—not one in fifty of whom can turn it to any profitable account. The limit of such physiological experiment, in its utmost latitude, should be to establish truth in the hands of a skilful experimenter, and not to demonstrate it to ignorant classes and encourage them to repeat it."
One cannot but remark the clear distinction of views which these words indicate. No antivivisectionist would accept the suggestion of a single experiment. Dr. Bigelow is speaking as a restrictionist against the free and unlimited vivisection which he rightly foresaw was about to be introduced into this country, and which has become the practice of the present day. He realizes that if once the laboratory system gains a foothold in his own college, the system will spread throughout America:
"The reaction which follows every excess will in time bear indignantly upon this. Until then it is dreadful to think how many poor animals will be subjected to excruciating agony as one medical college after another becomes penetrated with the idea that vivisection is a part of modern teaching, and that, to hold way with other institutions, they, too, must have their vivisector, their mutilated dogs, their guinea- pigs, their rabbits, their chamber of torture and of horrors, to advertise as a laboratory."
Nor this the only expression of Dr. Bigelow's opinions. In his work on "Surgical Anaesthesia," he left on record an even stronger condemnation of the abuses of vivisection and the cruelties which pertain to it. As he quotes from Stanley's "In Darkest Africa," which was published in 1890, it is evident that it represents his mature and settled judgment, down to the very close of his long and distinguished career. In this work he says:
"There can be no question that the discussion of vivisection arouses antagonistic human instincts. It is no common subject which enlists such earnest and opposite opinions. That there is something wrong about it is evident from the way in which the reputation of inflicting its torture is disclaimed. That for some reason it is a fascinating pursuit is equally evident from the bitter contest made for the right to practise it.