From an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

The Oriental hookah suggests a history anterior to the use of tobacco, but nothing is known of it. The word signifies a cocoanut-shell, and is applied to the jar (sometimes actually a cocoanut) containing perfumed water, through which smoke from a pipe, fixed so as to dip into the water, is drawn by a long tube with mouthpiece. It seems possible that this apparatus was in use for inhaling perfume by means of bubbles of air drawn through rose-water or such liquids, before tobacco-smoking was introduced, and that the tobacco-pipe and the perfume-jar were then combined. But travellers before the year 1600 do not mention the existence of the hookah in Persia or in India, though as soon as tobacco came into use this apparatus is described by Floris, in 1614, and by Olearius, in 1633, and by all subsequent travellers.

The conclusion to which careful inquiry has led is that though various Asiatic races have appreciated the smoke of various herbs and enjoyed inhaling it from time immemorial, yet there was no definite “smoking” in earlier times. No pipes or rolled-up packets of dried leaves—to be placed in the mouth and sucked whilst slowly burning—were in use before the introduction of tobacco by Europeans, who brought the tobacco-plant from America and the mode of enjoying its smoke, and passed on its seeds to the people of Turkey, Persia, India, China, and Japan.

41. Cruelty, Pain and Knowledge

It is difficult to write or to read or even to think about “cruelty” and preserve one’s sober judgment and reason. Most people are upset by emotion when torture and the details of the infliction of pain are discussed. All the more must we remember that emotion is a powerful driving force, but a bad guide. Only true knowledge and sound reasoning can guide us aright.

An awful fact about the emotional state produced by witnessing or hearing about the agonies of human beings or of sentient animals is that to some people (actually very few and diminishing in number among civilised races) it is distinctly a source of pleasure, though to most of us it is intolerably painful. This fact forms one of the most difficult problems of psychology. It seems that just as there are people who enjoy seeing dangerous acrobatic performances or climbing themselves among ice and rocks at the risk of their lives, or reading of hairbreadth escapes, of bloody murders, of ghosts, and other horrors—all of which are repulsive to the majority—so there are some people who experience delicious shudderings—“des frissons exquis”—when they see a man or an animal in torture or read a description of such things. In the eighteenth century it was not unusual for a country cousin on a visit to London to be taken as a treat to see half a dozen men and boys hanged at Newgate, and then to complete the happy day by a visit to Bedlam to see the madmen flogged! Fortunately, public opinion and education seem to have been able actually to alter the operation of the emotions excited by these brutalities—so that to-day practically everyone in the Western States of Europe regards the unnecessary infliction of pain with horror and indignation, and is anxious to avoid witnessing pain, even in cases where it is a necessary evil.

It is a mistake to suppose that there is any tendency on the part of scientific men or medical men to be callous or indifferent to the infliction of pain. The surgeon sometimes has to inflict pain in order to prevent greater future pain or death—but he is not indifferent to the pain he causes. He is not even “cruel only to be kind”—but appears cruel to the unthinking because he has to give pain which he knows will save his patient from far greater pain, and he has to maintain a calm and determined attitude in order to help those around him to exercise self-control. The medical art is, above all things, an art of removing and abolishing pain, and its practitioners are all the more sensitive concerning pain because they know more and see more of it than other people, and make it their chief business to alleviate suffering.

Charles Darwin took a prominent part twenty-five years ago in urging the Government of the day not to make a law which would prevent physiologists and medical men from obtaining knowledge as to animal life and disease by experiment. The great naturalist was a great lover of animals and a most gentle and tender-hearted man. He wrote to me in 1870: “Experiment must, of course, be allowed for the progress of physiology and medicine, but not for damnable and detestable curiosity. I will write no more about it, or I shall not sleep to-night.” Mr. Darwin was alluding to horrible so-called “experiments” which in former days—especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century—were made by utterly irresponsible and ignorant amateurs, witnessed by fashionable ladies, and reported in the newspapers and letters of the day. It is these reckless and useless “experiments” which rightly excited horror and opposition a century ago, and were described by the name “vivisection.” We have to thank these blundering philosophers of the salons of a past age for the mistaken feeling with which some people regard the really valuable and careful investigations which are made by medical men at the present day, with the use of every precaution to prevent pain to the animals used.

The testing of drugs, the inoculation of parasitic disease, and the trial of different modes of removing or controlling the disease so inoculated, carried on by highly trained and learned men, who thoroughly know what they are about, and who communicate with one another from all parts of the world as to the progress they are making in curing or even abolishing diseases, such as diphtheria, cholera, sleeping sickness, and phthisis are very different from the impudent unscientific “experiments” of the days of Horace Walpole. The inquiries carried on in the modern laboratories of our great universities should not for a moment be confused with the horrors performed to glorify and show the superior cold-bloodedness of drawing-room pretenders to science, in those strange times.

I believe that most sensible people feel as Mr. Darwin felt, and I myself would certainly subscribe to what he wrote to me in the letter which I have quoted above. Amongst those who feel thus strongly on the subject there are some who can control their emotion and calmly consider whether the pain inflicted under any given circumstances is justifiable as leading to a great ultimate diminution of pain by the knowledge obtained. There are others who are constitutionally incapable of controlling their emotion in this matter. They hear dreadful stories of cruelty, and are so upset that they are incapable of ascertaining whether the stories are true or not. They are quite unfit to weigh the question as to whether the pain given in the case they hear of may or may not be a necessary step towards avoiding far greater pain in the future for thousands of human beings and sentient animals. Far be it from me to think harshly of these tender-hearted people, though their mistaken outcry may tend to stop the discovery of pain-saving and life-saving knowledge. I feel more sympathy with them than with those (happily rare) individuals who are really indifferent to seeing or giving bodily pain to men or to animals.

There is reason to hope that careful and well-considered statement of the facts will eventually enable many of those who are mentally unhinged by descriptions of pain and bloodshed to recognise that they have been deceived, partly by their own fancies and partly by the false statements of professional agitators. Unfortunately, there are always present in human society individuals who find it to their advantage to excite the minds of their more emotional fellow-citizens by tales of horror. The lust of such power—the power to lead or urge a large body of men driven by emotional excitement into violent action—has led from time to time to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and elaborate plot and perjury directed against a group of innocent or worthy people, whose proceedings were mysterious or misunderstood by the community at large. Thus, from time to time, the crowd has been infuriated and led to the murder of the Jews by agitators, who started the baseless story that the Jews had slain a Christian child, and used its blood at their feast of the Passover. Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon made use of the unreasoning emotion of the crowd in the same way. To a less serious extent the emotional unreasonableness of a number of men and women is being played upon at the present day by quite a large variety of agitators, would-be leaders of crusades and campaigns against the beneficent work of the physiological and medical laboratories of our universities and medical schools.