III. Scientific research in biology must be based upon close and extensive observation of the varying forms of animal life, under natural conditions, with post-mortem examination of the records left by health and disease. Experiments, whether for the repair of lesions or the cure of disease, can only become scientific when made upon the type of life to be benefited by the experiment.
IV. Any experimentation which creates involuntary suffering in living creatures vitiates the necessary conditions of scientific research, and tends to degrade human conscience by producing indifference to suffering.
V. In training our future practitioners of the healing art, the cultivation of respect for life and the strengthening of enlightened sympathetic conscience in dealing with all poor or helpless creatures are of paramount importance. The present system of medical education requires revision in order to make health, not disease, the central subject of study.
Finally, full and generous encouragement to those who are engaged in important painless research is urgently needed. Such research should be carried on, if possible, in connection with the great body of serious scientific investigations, by persons of proved ability and clear moral sense, and the work should be cordially open to the observation of all earnest friends.
Such research, reconciling by right methods of investigation intellectual activity with human conscience, would increase our knowledge and advance our well-being in accordance with the higher reason of the race. Only when thus guided by intelligence and conscience can biological research deserve the noble name of science.
It is by the recognition of this true method of biological research and by the generous support of physiologists who honestly seek for truth, even when opposed by temporary fashions of medical opinion, that medicine will become a science.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Sir B. W. Richardson, Biological Experimentation: its Functions and Limits, p. 15.
[11] This sound method is well exemplified in the writings of the French naturalist, Le Roy.
[12] The former horrors of the hospital operating-room are graphically described from personal observation in Sir B. W. Richardson’s treatise, The Mastery of Pain.