"All Continental Europe is suffering from a sort of leprosy of decadence, mental and moral. The spiritual darkness of the people affects all the learned professions, but more especially medicine."
Such is the Medical Brief, which the official journal of Mr. Coleridge's society quotes incessantly, calling it "an American monthly of great ability and without a trace of the scientific bigotry and narrow-mindedness which is so prominent a feature in some of our own organs of medical opinion." Next we come to the Journal de Médecine de Paris. This is anti-Pasteur; the editor, Dr. Lutaud, came to London in 1899, and gave a lecture on "the Pasteur superstition" at St. Martin's Town Hall. From a report of it in the Star we may take the following sentences:—
"The result of the serum craze had been that the hospital was neglected for the laboratory. Microbes of all the diseases were found in perfectly healthy subjects. Microbes existed, but as a consequence, not a cause. Toxins which the seropaths professed to find were only the results of normal fermentation. The English public had always supported him in his fifteen years' struggle against Pasteurism."
Dr. Lutaud, says the National Society, is "the great authority." The New England Anti-vivisection Monthly in 1900 calls him one of "the brightest scientists of modern times." His Journal de Médecine de Paris recalls the Medical Brief:—
"To wish to apply the same methods of treatment, whether preventive or curative, for two morbid conditions (a wound with the point of entry abnormal and an infectious malady) in essence so different, is to commit a gross error.... The sick are destroyed by that which cures their wounds."
These two "medical journals," the Medical Brief and the Journal de Médecine de Paris, are upheld by the National Society as though they were expert witnesses of irresistible authority, and are quoted with a sort of ceaseless worship in that Society's official journal. Also it quotes the Herald of Health; and Medical Liberty, "a monthly publication issued by the Colorado Medical Liberty League, Denver, Colo., whose eloquent editor seems to be an uncompromising foe to medical bigotry and monopoly, and humbugs of every description."
Such are the medical journals which support the Zoophilist as a scientific journal. Now let us take another point of view. Let us consider whom the Zoophilist praises, and whom it condemns. That, surely, is a fair test of an official journal. And we get a clear result. The late Lord Salisbury and Mr. Arthur Balfour are "notoriously pro-vivisectionist"; Lord Lister has "apostatised from the anti-septic faith"; M. Pasteur is a "remorseless torturer"; the late Mr. Lecky was "degenerate," because he "performed the volte-face and went over to our opponents"; and the late Professor Virchow was subjected to "scathing criticism" by one Paffrath, and was proved to be absurd. But its praises are given to a very different set of men.
There is no room here to note the lighter moods of the Zoophilist; its jokes about cats and catacombs, and two-legged donkeys and four-legged donkeys, and how to catch mosquitoes by putting salt on their tails—and it will even break its jest on the dead—but it rebukes another journal for levity, saying, We regret to see our painful subject treated in this manner. No room, either, for its description of anti-vivisectionist plays, poems, novels, and sermons. Let us, to finish with, take a few statements from its pages, almost at random; some of them are reprinted there from other sources. The supply is endless; let us limit ourselves to six of them:—
1. "As other bacteria (beside those of malaria) were found not to bear sunlight or air, but to habitats in loca scuta situ (? to inhabit loca senta situ), in filth and noisomeness, their habits and customs preached again the old doctrine, 'Let in sun and air and be clean,' as earnestly as those who thought health was due to sun and air and water and fire, the four old elements, and act accordingly, without dissecting hecatombs of animals to prove a thousand times over that if you boiled or baked or drowned or freezed living creatures they would die, or that microscopic parasites did pretty much what visible parasites have been always known to do." (Loud applause)—Report of a speech by the Bishop of Southwell (1901).
2. "It is just as well that you should have heard what the clever level-headed lawyer (Mr. Coleridge) thinks about this abominable conspiracy of cruelty and fraud and impious inquisitiveness which is called vivisection. (Cheers.) ... We are sending out on the world in every direction multitudes of young men who have been trained as surgeons, and they have lived by cutting (reference here to the medical students in Pickwick), and we are sending these young men out with this cacoëthes secandi, this mania for cutting for the mere sake of cutting. I should not be surprised if they tackle our noses or our ears, and set about mutilating us in that way."—Archdeacon Wilberforce (1901).