The moral deterioration necessarily induced in those to whom suffering becomes a frequent spectacle is noted by the Englishman in Paris, from personal experience. After speaking of the inhumanity produced by the daily sight of blood in the originally honest bourgeois, who became the ‘Conventionnels’ of the French Revolution in 1793, he writes as follows: ‘I have witnessed three executions. After Pommeraye’s execution I was ill for a week; after Troppmann’s the effect soon wore off in three days; after Campa’s I ceased to think about it in twenty-four hours. Then I made a vow that no power on earth should draw me to the Place de la Roquette again. But men generally regard their growing imperviousness as a sign of mental force, and pride themselves upon it.’
In Marie Bashkertseff’s Journal is a striking passage which describes the effect of a Spanish bull-fight. She says: ‘I was able to maintain a tranquil air in full view of the butchery, carried on with the utmost refinement of cruelty. One leaves the scene slightly intoxicated with blood, and feeling desirous to thrust a lance into the neck of every person one meets. I stuck my knife into the melon I was cutting at table as if it were a banderilla I were planting in the hide of a bull, and the pulp seemed like the palpitating flesh of the wounded animal. The sight is one that makes the knees tremble and the head throb. It is a lesson in murder.’
The moral distinction between heroism shown when suffering is witnessed for the purpose of aiding the sufferer and that evinced for the selfish desire of individual gain or excitement, was strikingly exhibited by a German nurse whom we sent on to the army during the Civil War in America. This frail-looking woman drifted on to the front, and, after the Battle of Gettysburg, donning a pair of man’s boots, wading in pools of blood and mud, spent two days and nights on the field of slaughter, drawing out still breathing bodies from the heaps of slain, binding up wounds, giving a draught of water, placing a rough pillow under the head, in an unselfish enthusiasm that knew neither hunger nor fatigue. The ghastly wounds, the blood, the shrieks and groans of that horrid scene served but as fuel to the fire of humanity that consumed her.
The Effect on Teachers or Practitioners of Medicine.—In considering the subject of experimentation, reason requires that we realize the necessary distinction between the methods employed in training students for a practical profession and the exceptional position of the few geniuses who possess the rare combination of qualities essential to scientific investigation. In calling attention to this distinction we do not condone torture, for this can be proved to be unscientific. But it emphasizes a growing and mischievous evil of the present day when numbers of ordinary teachers of physiology, whose gifts are limited and whose especial business is to instruct students in the knowledge which has been attained, consider themselves capable of original scientific research, or attempt to repeat before either students or popular audiences so-called demonstrations on living creatures.
The showy plan of experimenting on animals is undoubtedly a great temptation to teachers. Such practice readily gains the gratifying applause of inexperienced learners, who are misled by an appearance of conclusiveness in the lectures, which they are quite incompetent to gauge. But the influence thus exercised is a harmful one, diverting the mind from right methods of study.
The temptation to make a display before imperfectly informed persons is too great. If the profession is to advance in popular esteem, it will recognise that the unfeeling destruction of living creatures, even the pithing of a frog or the dissection of the salivary glands of a living mouse, is a false method of forming the minds of students, which should be entirely abandoned.
We must here note the demand lately made by some leading members of the profession for increased facilities for experimentation on animals. Now, anyone who studies the Cruelty to Animals Bill (30 and 40 Vict.), which in 1876 licensed vivisection in Great Britain,[15] will see how easy it now is to obtain a license, and how carefully the provisions of the Bill are arranged to give freedom to experimentation—in fact, to protect experimenters rather than their helpless victims. Thus, whilst in Section 2 a penalty of £100 or three months’ imprisonment is imposed for acts of cruelty, the Bill proceeds in Section 3 to give absolute freedom to every licensed person to torture, to mutilate, to disease to any extent if he considers it advisable to do so. In Section 11 it gives exceedingly wide scope for procuring licenses. By Sections 7 to 10 it makes the efficient oversight of licensed persons almost impossible, and by the provisions of Sections 13 to 15 it virtually excludes the influence of growing humanitary conscience in the community from being exerted on the persons and places licensed. In short, the Bill would rather seem to be skilfully devised to give a free hand to persons who may call themselves ‘scientific’ than to protect living creatures who cannot protect themselves.
The plea put forward by the gentlemen referred to—viz., that medical progress is now hindered in England by restrictions—is practically a justification by them of the inhuman practices which prevail in France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, and in all countries where the conscience of the people has not been aroused to the moral and intellectual dangers involved in the torture of animals.[16]
Surely these English physicians who demand entire freedom for vivisection do not realize what the result of foreign methods is. They cannot have noted the innumerable examples of atrocious cruelty which are occurring in the records of medical research as practised on the Continent and in America.
They cannot have taken note of such typical examples as the utterly useless barbarity of Senn of Philadelphia, setting fire to a dog that he had pumped full of hydrogen gas, before the Medical Congress of Berlin in 1890. Nor the experiments in massage on a series of large disjointed dogs performed in Professor Charles Richet’s Paris laboratory, not only with the permission, but with the consultative advice of that gentleman. A set of more unjustifiable experiments were never devised.