When we investigate the popular or ethical aspect of so-called scientific research made upon living animals, we are at once met by facts which imperatively demand both serious thought and determined action if we would not be participators in the degradation of human conscience. We are confronted with the enormous increase in such experiments which has taken place within the last thirty years, as well as in the severity of the sufferings inflicted. This increase is going on in England as well as in foreign countries.[14] It is growing in many cases, not only without any benefit to the human race, but also without reference to any supposed beneficial result as its attempted justification.
The volume of facts and evidence collected by Mr. Colam (the able Secretary of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals), and published by that society in 1876, is a permanent record of great value. It enables us to measure the growth of experimentation in England, not only from 1862 to 1876, when the present Cruelty to Animals Bill was enacted, but it also forms a point of comparison for testing the increase of vivisectional methods since 1876 to the present day, when these easy but often fallacious methods of research have become universal in medical investigation and medical instruction.
In 1869 there were very few places where the experimentation on animals could be carried on, such investigations being made by men of rare ability, and for a definite object. There were no class demonstrations and no students encouraged to experiment. But in 1892 there were 180 persons licensed in this country, and over 3,960 experiments performed, numbers which increase with each year.
The Effect on Students and Subordinates.—A point for serious consideration is the effect produced upon the unformed minds of students of medicine by the introduction of experimentation upon living animals into our medical schools and hospitals.
The employment of destructive experimentation on living creatures is now introduced as a part of the ordinary instruction of medical students in the fundamental study—physiology. This is a novelty of the present generation. During the whole course of my medical studies, fifty years ago, I never saw a living creature vivisected for the instruction of students. The same is true of the experience of most of the able physicians of an older generation.
Now, however, nearly every medical school has its store of imprisoned living creatures awaiting their fate, from the large frogs imported from Germany, the mice, rabbits, cats, and dogs of home production, to the cargoes of monkeys brought to our foggy climate from tropical Africa. They form an enormous mass of living creatures, kept for the attempted demonstration of vital action in the lecture-room, or for the study of diseased processes in the physiological laboratory.
It is a fallacy (although proclaimed in high places) that the ordinary student of medicine must be prepared for his practical work as a physician for men by watching the opening of chest, abdomen, brain, or cutting into the delicate vital organs of lower animals. Such demonstration is a thrilling spectacle to inexperienced students. It appeals to that love of excitement which makes them rush to a surgical operation, or to an extraordinary medical case, whilst the commonplace but all-important bedside observation seems dull in comparison. Yet patient work in the anatomical and microscopic rooms, and in the chemical laboratory for general and animal chemistry and close clinical study, all of which involve no form of suffering, are of primary importance. The genius of a Professor as an instructor is shown by his ability to make his pupils realize this.
Destructive experimentation on helpless animals, not for their own benefit, is a demoralizing practice. The student becomes familiar with the use of gags, straps, screws, and all the paraphernalia of ingenious instruments invented for overpowering the resistance of the living creature, or for guarding the operator from injury in case the anæsthetic, when used, should give out too soon. He learns also how easy it is to experiment in secret.
By advanced instruction and post-graduate classes the student is led on to take active part under licensed authority in this fascinating, but morally dangerous, method of study. Moreover, the large body of subordinates who are necessary to take charge of and prepare the animals, are trained in indifference to suffering, without any excuse of intellectual gain, and the same injurious influence extends in ever-widening circles—to the traders who invent and sell instruments of torture, and to those who supply the living material.
Now, the natural instinct to be cherished in human beings is protection and kindliness to infancy and all helpless creatures, not indifference to suffering or wilful infliction of it. As human conscience is a thing of growth or degradation, the natural shrinking from needless pain can soon be hardened into callousness. Conversing with medical students in relation to the effect made upon them by witnessing vivisections even under chloroform, I have found that their experience is always the same—viz., first, the shock of repulsion, then tolerance, and then, if often repeated, indifference.