Let us also reflect a little on this point: an animal has to die just as much as we ourselves. Now, natural death would certainly be for him a long and cruel agony, lasting several hours, several days, perhaps several weeks. Well, then, we replace hideous old age, the agony of prolonged tortures due to disease, by a dreamless sleep, which at once plunges the animal into nothingness, without his passing through the intermediary stage of necessary suffering. Is this what is called being inhuman? For my part, I shall regret on my death-bed that no physiologist will be found whose conscience will permit him, or, if so, who would have sufficient courage to help me to pass away under the influence of chloroform, ether, chloralose, morphia, or chloral, thus saving me from the throes of the final struggle, and bestowing upon me a peaceful death and an easy termination of all suffering.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] In England, the Vivisection Act expressly states that curare is not to be regarded as an anæsthetic, and this proviso has been loyally accepted by English physiologists. On those rare occasions when curare is used, and the occasions are very rare indeed, and year by year they become rarer, a volatile anæsthetic such as chloroform or A.C.E. (alcohol, chloroform, ether) mixture is administered at the same time in sufficient amount to render anæsthesia absolute. One should add that since Claude Bernard's work on curare, physiologists have seen reason for doubting whether it leaves sensibility intact, as Bernard thought. But as there is doubt on the question, and the available evidence in favour of its lulling sensations is small, it is still considered advisable to retain Bernard's views, and act as though it is not an anæsthetic at all.—(W. D. H.)
CHAPTER IV
CONCERNING EXPERIMENTATION OTHER THAN VIVISECTION
We must, however, give to the word "Vivisection" its largest acceptation. It is not only a question of cutting nerves, of stimulating the glands, or of exciting the muscles. There are experiments of much longer duration in which there is no mutilation properly speaking, but intoxication,[7] produced by the injection of poisons and disease germs.
It is, indeed, evident that pain can be provoked in other ways than by a sharp-edged instrument, which can always be done under anæsthesia. But may inoculation be performed? May prolonged intoxication be caused? To treat the question in all its fulness, we will put the problem in the following manner.
In order to study a disease, have we the right to give that disease to an animal?