From all these instances in physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and therapeutics, we come to consider the Act relating to experiments on animals in the United Kingdom. Many subjects have been left out; among them, the work of the last few years on the suprarenal glands and adrenalin, and Dr. William Hunter's admirable work on pernicious anæmia. No attempt has been made to describe the researches of experts in many countries into the nature of malignant disease, or to guess what may come of the discovery that mice can be immunised against that form of cancer which occurs in mice and is inoculable from mouse to mouse. Nothing has been said of the discovery that the African sleeping-sickness is due to a blood-parasite carried by flies from man to man. Nothing has been said about those discoveries in bacteriology that have not yet been applied to practice, or of the many inventions of medical and surgical practice that owe only an indirect debt to experiments on animals. Artificial respiration, the transfusion of saline fluid, the hypodermic administration of drugs, the use of oxygen for inhalation, the torsion of arteries, the grafting of skin, the transplantation of bone, the absorbable ligature, the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of electricity, the rational employment of blood-letting—all these good methods have been left out of the list; only some facts have been presented, those that mark most clearly the advance of knowledge and of practice, and stand up even above the rest of the work. There they will stand, when we are all dead and gone: and by them, as by landmarks, all further advance will be guided.
PART III
THE ACT RELATING TO EXPERIMENTS
ON ANIMALS IN GREAT BRITAIN
AND IRELAND
ACT 39 AND 40 VIC. c. 77
The Royal Commission "On the Practice of subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes," was appointed on 22nd June 1875. Its members were—Lord Cardwell (chairman), Lord Winmarleigh, Mr. W. E. Forster, Sir John Karslake, Mr. Huxley, Mr. (Sir John) Erichsen, and Mr. Hutton. Between 5th July and 30th December, 53 witnesses were examined, and 6551 questions were put and answered. The report of the Commission bears date 8th January 1876, and in that year the present Act received the Royal Assent.
The evidence before the Commission was all, or nearly all, concerned with physiology, with the work of Magendie, Claude Bernard, and Sir Charles Bell, the action of curare, the Handbook of the Physiological Laboratory, the teaching of physiology, and so forth. Very little was said of pathology; and of bacteriology next to nothing. Practically, physiology alone came before the Commissioners; and such experiments in physiology as are now, the youngest of them, more than thirty years old.
Bacteriology, at the time of the passing of the Act, had hardly made a beginning. Therefore the Act made no special provision for inoculations, injections, and the whole study of immunisation of animals and men against disease. Experiments of this kind have to be scheduled under one of the existing certificates, to bring them under an Act that was drafted without foreknowledge of them. Certificate A or Certificate B has to be used for this purpose:—