In a controversy with Dr. Pye-Smith, who had read a paper before the British Association, Miss Cobbe writes as follows to one of the public journals:
"Dr. Pye-Smith is reported to have said: 'Happily, the neccessary experiments were comparatively few.' Few! What are a "few" experiments? Professor Schiff in ten years experimented on 14,000 dogs, given over to him by the Municipality of Florence, and returned their carcases so mangled that the man who had contracted for their skins found them useless. He also experimented on pigeons, cats, and rabbits to the number, it is calculated, of 70,000 creatures; and he now asks for ten dogs a week in Geneva. All over Germany and France there are laboratories "using" (as the horrible phrase is) numberless animals, inasmuch as I have just received a letter stating that dogs are actually becoming scarce in Lyons, and it is proposed to breed them for the purpose of Vivisection. Be this true or not, I invite any of your readers to visit the office of the Victoria Street Society, and examine the volumes of splendid plates of vivisecting instruments, which will there be shown them, and then judge for themselves whether it be for a few experiments that those elaborate and costly inventions have become a regular branch of manufacture. Let them examine the volume of the English handbook of the physiological laboratory, the volume of Cyon's magnificent atlas, with its 54 plates, the Archives de Physiologie, with its 191 plates, the Physiologische Methodik, or Claude Bernard's Leçons sur la Chaleur Animale, with its pictures of the stoves wherein he baked dogs and rabbits alive; and after these sights of disgust and horror they will know how to understand the word "few" in the vocabulary of a physiologist. I am glad to hear that a German opponent of Vivisection recently entering a shop devoted to the sale of these tools of torture, was greeted by the proprietor with a volley of abuse: 'It is you and your friends,' he said, 'who are destroying my trade. I used to sell a hundred of Czermak's tables and other instruments for one I sell now.'
"Dr. Pye-Smith said: 'Many of the experiments inflicted no pain or injury whatever, and the great majority of the rest were rendered painless by the use of those beneficial agents which abolished pain and had themselves been discovered by experiments upon living animals.' As to the use of anæsthetics in annulling the agonies of mutilated animals, the audience ought to have asked Dr. Pye-Smith to explain whether he intended to refer to chloroform, or the narcotic morphia, or, lastly, to the drug curare. If he referred to chloroform, Dr. Hoggan tells from his own experience (Anæsthetics, p. 1), that 'nothing can be more uncertain than its influence on the lower animals; many of them die before they become insensible. Complete and conscientious anæsthesia is seldom even attempted, the animal getting at most a slight whiff of chloroform by way of satisfying the conscience of the operator, or enabling him to make statements of a humane character.' Even if it were conscientiously administered at the beginning of an experiment, how little would chloroform diminish the misery of Rutherford's dogs or Brunton's ninety cats, whose long-drawn agonies extended over many days? How little could it affect in any way the cases of starving, poisoning, baking, stewing to death, or burning,—like the twenty-five dogs over which Professor Wertheim poured turpentine and then set them on fire, leaving them afterwards slowly to perish? If Dr. Pye-Smith was thinking of morphia, the reader may refer to Claude Bernard's Leçons de Physiologie Operatoire, where he will find that great physiologists recommends its use; but at the same time mentions (as of no particular consequence) that the animal subjected to its influence still 'suffers pain.' I can hardly suppose, lastly, that Dr. Pye-Smith was secretly thinking of curare, and that he is one of those whom Tennyson says would
"Mangle the living dog which loved him and fawned at his knee,
Drenched with the hellish oorali."
It is bad enough to "mangle" a loving and intelligent creature without adding to its agonies the paralysis of the powers of motion, and the increased sensibility to pain occasioned by this horrible drug, which nevertheless Bernard, in the work above quoted, says is in such common use among physiologists, that when an experiment is not otherwise described, it may always be "taken for granted it has been performed on a curarized dog."
Finally, Dr. Pye-Smith says, "It was remarkable that the small residue of experiments in which some amount of pain was necessary were chiefly those in which the direct and immediate benefit to mankind was more obvious. He referred to the trying of drugs on animals, to discovering antidotes to poisons," etc. The bribe here offered to human selfishness is an ingenious one. "Let us," the physiologists say, "retain the right to put animals to torture, for it is very 'remarkable' that when we do so it is always in your interest!" Unluckily for this appeal to the meaner feelings of human nature, which these modern instructors of our young men are not ashamed to put forward, it is difficult for them to hit on any one instance wherein out of their "few" (million) experiments any good to mankind has been, even apparently, achieved. As Claude Bernard honestly said, at least as regards any benefit for suffering humanity, "Nos mains sont vides." As to the trying of drugs on animals, Dr. Pritchard, who is, I believe, the best living authority on the subject, told the Royal Commission (Minutes, 908), "I do not think that the use of drugs on animals can be taken as a guide to the doses or to the action of the same drugs on the human subjects." As to the discovery of antidotes to poison, the only man who seems on the verge of any success is the brave and noble fellow who has been trying such experiments not on animals but on himself.
In conclusion, I must add one word on Dr. Pye-Smith's last sentence, namely, "that legislation against vivisection is injurious to the best interests of the community." Sir, I know not what vivisectors deem to be the best interests of the community. For my part I do not reckon them to be the influence of drugs, nor yet susceptible of being carved out with surgical instruments. I do not think that they consist in escape from physical pain, nor even in the prolongation for a few years of our little earthly life. I hold that the best interests of the community are the moral and immortal interests of every soul in such community, namely, the conquest of selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty, and the development of the god-like sense of justice and love—the growth of the divinest thing in human nature, the faculty of sympathizing with the joys and sorrows of all God's creatures. Believing these to be "the best interests of the community," I ask, without hesitation, for the suppression of this abominable trade, which can best be described as "Pitilessness practised as a profession." If vivisection be indeed the true method of studying physiology, if physiology cannot be advanced except by vivisection, if chemical observation and microscopic research be useless for the purpose, and nothing but the torture of animals and the demoralization of men will suffice for its progress—then, in God's name, I say, let physiology stop at the point it has reached, even till the day of doom.—I am, Sir, with apologies for the length of this letter, yours, etc.
Frances Power Cobbe
Certainly, as regards the ethics of vivisection, nothing more eloquent has ever been written than this closing paragraph.