II. The majority of vivisections requisite for purposes of teaching physiological facts may be so carried on as to take life with less pain or inconvenience to the animal than is absolutely necessary in order to furnish meat for our tables. Those who would make it a penal offense to submit to a class of college students the unconscious and painless demonstration of functional activity of the heart, for example, and yet demand for the gratification of appetite the daily slaughter of oxen and sheep without anæsthetics, and without any attempt to minimize the agony of terror, fear and pain—may not be inconsistent. But it is a view the writer cannot share.
III. Prohibition of all experiments may be fairly demanded by those who believe that the enthusiastic ardor of the scientific experimenter or lecturer, will outweigh all considerations of good faith, provided success or failure of his experiment depend on the consciousness of pain. In other words, that the experimenter himself, as a rule, cannot be trusted to obey the law, should the law restrict.
This also is an extreme position.
IV. Absolute liberty in the matter of painful experiments has produced admitted abuses by physiologists of Germany, France and Italy. In America it has led to the repetition before classes of students of Magendie's extreme cruelties,—demonstrations which have been condemned by every leading English physiologist.
V. In view of the dangerous impulses not unfrequently awakened by the sight of pain intentionally inflicted, experiments of this kind should be by legal enactment absolutely forbidden before classes of students, especially in our Public Schools.
VI. It is not in accord with scientific accuracy to contend for unlimited freedom of painful experimentation, on the ground of its vast utility to humanity in the discovery of new methods for the cure of disease. On the contrary, so far as can be discovered by a careful study of English mortality statistics, physiological experiments upon living animals for fifty years back have in no single instance lessened the fatality of any disease below its average of thirty-five years ago.
VII. Vivisection, involving the infliction of pain is, even in its best possible aspect, a necessary evil, and ought at once to be restricted within the narrowest limits, and placed under the supervision of the State.