“I went outside the experimentalists’ conclusions, went back to the true science of the old pathologist and of the surgeon of 1701, and performed the operation in scores of cases with almost uniform success. My example was immediately followed throughout the world, and during the last five or six years hundreds if not thousands of women’s lives have been saved, whilst for nearly forty years the simple road to this gigantic success was closed by the folly of a vivisector....
“Views such as mine are those of a minority of my professional brethren, and are generally sneered at as those of a crank. But my reply to this is that they form the new belief, that of the coming generation, and that not one in fifty of the bulk of my present brethren have ever seriously gone into the question, and probably have never seen a single experiment on a living animal.
“My address as the Surgical Orator of 1890, when the British Medical Association met in this town, was mainly directed to the mischievous system of so-called scientific training, of purely German origin and thoroughly repugnant to our English tastes and our English common-sense.
“It is therefore a satisfactory matter to know that the Council of Mason’s College would have none of it, and that the governing body of the new University College of Nottingham has recently decided similarly. The Medical School of Queen’s College is now united entirely with the Science School of Mason’s College; but we, of Mason’s College, have had the direction of the science teaching of the Medical School for several years, we have had no German scientific methods, and our success has not diminished thereby one atom—on the contrary.”—Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., President of Mason’s Science College, Birmingham (“The Discussion on Vivisection at the Church Congress, October, 1892”).
At the Congress, as above, Professor Horsley made aspersions on Miss Frances Power Cobbe, as to statements concerning Vivisection in her work, “The Nine Circles.” The professor declared some of the reported cruel experiments to have been painless, owing to the victims being under the influence of anæsthetics. In reply to the attack, the following preliminary letter from Miss Cobbe was then published:—
“TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘TIMES.’
“Sir,—Professor Horsley’s criticism on the above work—planned and compiled by my direction—demands from me a careful reply, which I shall endeavour to give as soon as may be possible at this distance from the books whence the impugned passages are derived. I shall be much surprised if the hocus pocus of the sham anæsthetic curare with ineffective applications of genuine chloroform do not once more illustrate ‘the curse of vivisectible animals,’ and if the results of the experiments in question, whatever were their worth, would not, in most cases, have been vitiated had real and absolute anæsthesia been produced in the victims. Should a small number of the experiments cited in the ‘Nine Circles’ prove, however, to have been performed on animals in an entirely painless state, I shall, while withdrawing them with apologies from a forthcoming new edition of the book, take care at the same time to call attention to the multitude of other experiments, home and foreign, therein recorded—e.g., baking to death, poisoning, starving, creating all manner of diseases, inoculating in the eyes, dissecting out and irritating the exposed nerves, causing the brain of cats ‘to run like cream,’ etc., about which no room for doubt as to the unassuaged agony of the animal can possibly exist.”
Miss Cobbe concludes by a sharp, but just, criticism on her critic, and with an acute diagnosis of the learned vivisectionist’s own condition:—
“The tone of Dr. Horsley’s remarks against me personally will probably inspire those who know me and the history of my connexion with the anti-vivisection cause with an amused sense of the difficulty wherein the Professor must have found himself when, instead of argument in defence of vivisection, he thus turned to ‘abuse the plaintiffs’ attorney.’ For myself I gladly accept such abuse (or mere bluster) as evidence that the consciences even of eminent vivisectors are, like their victims’ nerves, imperfectly under the influence of the scientific anæsthesia, and remain still sensitive to the heart-pricking charge which I bring against them, of cowardly cruelty to defenceless creatures.
“I am, Sir, yours,