Already at a preceding Congress held in Amsterdam, Virchow had said amid the applause of the Assembly: “Those who attack vivisection have not the faintest idea of Science, and even less of the importance and utility of vivisection for the progress of medicine.” But to this just argument, the international leagues for the protection of animals—very powerful, like everything that is founded on a sentiment which may be exalted—had answered by combative phrases. The physiological laboratories were compared to chambers of torture. It seemed as if, through caprice or cruelty, quite uselessly at any rate, this and that man of science had the unique desire of inflicting on bound animals, secured on a board, sufferings of which death was the only limit. It is easy to excite pity towards animals; an audience is conquered as soon as dogs are mentioned. Which of us, whether a cherished child, a neglected old maid, a man in the prime of his youth or a misanthrope weary of everything, has not, holding the best place in his recollections, the memory of some example of fidelity, courage or devotion given by a dog? In order to raise the revolt, it was sufficient for anti-vivisectionists to evoke amongst the ghosts of dog martyrs the oft-quoted dog who, whilst undergoing an experiment, licked the hand of the operator. As there had been some cruel abuses on the part of certain students, those abuses alone were quoted. Scientists did not pay much heed to this agitation, partly a feminine one: they relied on the good sense of the public to put an end to those doleful declamations. But the English Parliament voted a Bill prohibiting vivisection; and, after 1876, English experimentalists had to cross the Channel to inoculate a guinea-pig.
Virchow did not go into details; but, in a wide exposé of Experimental Physiological Medicine, he recalled how, at each new progress of Science—at one time against the dissection of dead bodies and now against experiments on living animals—the same passionate criticisms had been renewed. The Interdiction Bill voted in England had filled a new Leipzig Society with ardour; it had asked the Reichstag in that same year, 1881, to pass a law punishing cruelty to animals under pretext of scientific research, by imprisonment, varying between five weeks and two years, and deprivation of civil rights. Other societies did not go quite so far, but asked that some of their members should have a right of entrance and inspection into the laboratories of the Faculties.
“He who takes more interest in animals than in Science and in the knowledge of truth is not qualified to inspect officially things pertaining to Science,” said Virchow. With an ironical gravity on his quizzical wrinkled face, he added, “Where shall we be if a scientist who has just begun a bonâ fide experiment finds himself, in the midst of his researches, obliged to answer questions from a new-comer and afterwards to defend himself before some magistrate for the crime of not having chosen another method, other instruments, perhaps another experiment?...
“We must prove to the whole world the soundness of our cause,” concluded Virchow, uneasy at those “leagues” which grew and multiplied, and scattered through innumerable lecture halls the most fallacious judgments on the work of scientists.
Pasteur might have brought him, to support his statements relative to certain deviations of ideas and sentiments, numberless letters which reached him regularly from England—letters full of threats, insults and maledictions, devoting him to eternal torments for having multiplied his crimes on the hens, guinea-pigs, dogs and sheep of the laboratory. Love of animals carries some women to such lengths!
It would have been interesting, if, after Virchow’s speech, some French physician had in his turn related a series of facts, showing how prejudices equally tenacious had had to be struggled against in France, and how savants had succeeded in enforcing the certainty that there can be no pathological science if Physiology is not progressing, and that it can only progress by means of the experimental method. Claude Bernard had expressed this idea under so many forms that it would almost have been enough to give a few extracts from his works.
In 1841, when he was Magendie’s curator, he was one day attending a lesson on experimental physiology, when he saw an old man come in, whose costume—a long coat with a straight collar and a hat with a very wide brim—indicated a Quaker.
“Thou hast no right,” he said, addressing Magendie, “to kill animals or to make them suffer. Thou givest a wicked example and thou accustomest thy fellow creatures to cruelty.”
Magendie replied that it was a pity to look at it from that point of view, and that a physiologist, when moved by the thought of making a discovery useful to Medicine, and consequently useful to his fellow creatures, did not deserve that reproach.
“Your countryman Harvey,” said he, hoping to convince him, “would not have discovered the circulation of the blood if he had not made some experiments in vivisection. That discovery was surely worth the sacrifice of a few deer in Charles the First’s Park?”