He returned to his reading. Lemuel watched him—still confidently waiting for results.
The letter proceeded in these terms:
“Your employer may perhaps be inclined to publish my work, if I can satisfy him that it will address itself to the general reader.
“We all know what are the false pretences, under which English physiologists practice their cruelties. I want to expose those false pretences in the simplest and plainest way, by appealing to my own experience as an ordinary working member of the medical profession.
“Take the pretence of increasing our knowledge of the curative action of poisons, by trying them on animals. The very poisons, the action of which dogs and cats have been needlessly tortured to demonstrate, I have successfully used on my human patients in the practice of a lifetime.
“I should also like to ask what proof there is that the effect of a poison on an animal may be trusted to inform us, with certainty, of the effect of the same poison on a man. To quote two instances only which justify doubt—and to take birds this time, by way of a change—a pigeon will swallow opium enough to kill a man, and will not be in the least affected by it; and parsley, which is an innocent herb in the stomach of a human being, is deadly poison to a parrot.
“I should deal in the same way, with the other pretence, of improving our practice of surgery by experiment on living animals.
“Not long since, I saw the diseased leg of a dog cut off at the hip joint. When the limb was removed, not a single vessel bled. Try the same operation on a man—and twelve or fifteen vessels must be tied as a matter of absolute necessity.
“Again. We are told by a great authority that the baking of dogs in ovens has led to new discoveries in treating fever. I have always supposed that the heat, in fever, is not a cause of disease, but a consequence. However, let that be, and let us still stick to experience. Has this infernal cruelty produced results which help us to cure scarlet fever? Our bedside practice tells us that scarlet fever runs it course as it always did. I can multiply such examples as these by hundreds when I write my book.
“Briefly stated, you now have the method by which I propose to drag the scientific English Savage from his shelter behind the medical interests of humanity, and to show him in his true character,—as plainly as the scientific Foreign Savage shows himself of his own accord. He doesn’t shrink behind false pretences. He doesn’t add cant to cruelty. He boldly proclaims the truth:—I do it, because I like it!”