II.
[Report of American Anti-vivisection Society, Jan. 1888.]
"There remain two grounds to adopt: one the total abolition of all experiments; the other the total abolition of all painful experiments. This latter position, which is the one that Dr. Bigelow of Boston and Dr. Leffingwell have assumed, has engaged our attention for a long time; but, after bestowing upon it careful consideration, we feel that we must give it up as impracticable. To secure immunity from pain there must be absolutely perfect anæsthesia. This can be only obtained in two ways: one is by trusting to the experimenter himself to give sufficient of the anæsthetic; the other to insist that an assistant shall be present for the express purpose of keeping the animal under perfect anæsthesia. Now is it anyway likely that either of these conditions would be observed?"
III.
[From the "Therapeutic Gazette," Detroit, Aug., 1880.]
"Vivisection is grossly abused in the United States. * * We would add our condemnation of the ruthless barbarity which is every winter perpetrated in the Medical Schools of this country. History records some frightful atrocities perpetrated in the name of Religion; but it has remained for the enlightenment and humaneness of this century to stultify themselves by tolerating the abuses of the average physiological laboratory—all conducted in the name of Science. There is only one way to progress in Therapeutics; and that is by clinical observation; the noting of the action of individual drugs under particular diseased conditions. He who has the largest practice and is the keenest observer, and the most systematic recorder of what he sees, does the most to advance Medicine."
IV.
[From editorial in "The Spectator," London, July 17, 1880.]
"A memorial for the absolute abolition of vivisection has been presented to Mr. Gladstone with a great many most influential signatures attached. For our own part, were the experiments on the inoculation of animal diseases excepted,—experiments which, we venture to say, have sometimes proved of the greatest value to animals themselves,—we should, on the whole, be content to go with the abolitionists, not because we think all experiments, especially when conducted under strict anæsthetics, wrong, but because when they are permitted at all it is so extremely difficult to enforce properly and fully humane conditions. Dr. A. Leffingwell has sufficiently shown in the able paper in the July Scribner's Magazine, how extremely few remedies of value have resulted from this awfully costly expenditure of anguish. 'If pain could be estimated in money' he justly says, 'no corporation would be satisfied with such a waste of capital.' Take, as the single illustration of this most weighty sentence, Dr. Leffingwell's statement that what the late Dr. Sharpey called 'Magendie's infamous experiment' on the stomach of the dog, has been repeated 200 times without establishing to the satisfaction of scientific physiologists the theory for which that act of wickedness was first committed. No wonder the society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection goes to extremes."
FOOTNOTES
[1] Report of American Anti-Vivisection Society, Jan'y 30, 1888.