CHAPTER VI. _restriction of Experiment_

Restriction of Experiment

When we investigate the popular or ethical aspect of so-called scientific research made upon living animals, we are at once met by facts which imperatively demand both serious thought and determined action if we would not be participators in the degradation of human conscience. We are confronted with the enormous increase in such experiments which has taken place within the last thirty years, as well as in the severity of the sufferings inflicted. This increase is going on in England as well as in foreign countries. It is growing in many cases, not only without any benefit to the human race, but also without reference to any supposed beneficial result as its attempted justification.

The volume of facts and evidence collected by Mr. Colam (the able Secretary of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals), and published by that society in 1876, is a permanent record of great value. It enables us to measure the growth of experimentation in England, not only from 1862 to 1876, when the present Cruelty to Animals Bill was enacted, but it also forms a point of comparison for testing the increase of vivisectional methods since 1876 to the present day, when these easy but often fallacious methods of research have become universal in medical investigation and medical instruction.

In 1869 there were very few places where the experimentation on animals could be carried on, such investigations being made by men of rare ability, and for a definite object. There were no class demonstrations and no students encouraged to experiment. But in 1892 there were 180 persons licensed in this country, and over 3,960 experiments performed, numbers which increase with each year.

The Effect on Students and Subordinates.--A point for serious consideration is the effect produced upon the unformed minds of students of medicine by the introduction of experimentation upon living animals into our medical schools and hospitals.

The employment of destructive experimentation on living creatures is now introduced as a part of the ordinary instruction of medical students in the fundamental study--physiology. This is a novelty of the present generation. During the whole course of my medical studies, fifty years ago, I never saw a living creature vivisected for the instruction of students. The same is true of the experience of most of the able physicians of an older generation.

Now, however, nearly every medical school has its store of imprisoned living creatures awaiting their fate, from the large frogs imported from Germany, the mice, rabbits, cats, and dogs of home production, to the cargoes of monkeys brought to our foggy climate from tropical Africa. They form an enormous mass of living creatures, kept for the attempted demonstration of vital action in the lecture-room, or for the study of diseased processes in the physiological laboratory.

It is a fallacy (although proclaimed in high places) that the ordinary student of medicine must be prepared for his practical work as a physician for men by watching the opening of chest, abdomen, brain, or cutting into the delicate vital organs of lower animals. Such demonstration is a thrilling spectacle to inexperienced students. It appeals to that love of excitement which makes them rush to a surgical operation, or to an extraordinary medical case, whilst the commonplace but all-important bedside observation seems dull in comparison. Yet patient work in the anatomical and microscopic rooms, and in the chemical laboratory for general and animal chemistry and close clinical study, all of which involve no form of suffering, are of primary importance. The genius of a Professor as an instructor is shown by his ability to make his pupils realize this.

Destructive experimentation on helpless animals, not for their own benefit, is a demoralizing practice. The student becomes familiar with the use of gags, straps, screws, and all the paraphernalia of ingenious instruments invented for overpowering the resistance of the living creature, or for guarding the operator from injury in case the anæsthetic, when used, should give out too soon. He learns also how easy it is to experiment in secret.

By advanced instruction and post-graduate classes the student is led on to take active part under licensed authority in this fascinating, but morally dangerous, method of study. Moreover, the large body of subordinates who are necessary to take charge of and prepare the animals, are trained in indifference to suffering, without any excuse of intellectual gain, and the same injurious influence extends in ever-widening circles--to the traders who invent and sell instruments of torture, and to those who supply the living material.

Now, the natural instinct to be cherished in human beings is protection and kindliness to infancy and all helpless creatures, not indifference to suffering or wilful infliction of it. As human conscience is a thing of growth or degradation, the natural shrinking from needless pain can soon be hardened into callousness. Conversing with medical students in relation to the effect made upon them by witnessing vivisections even under chloroform, I have found that their experience is always the same--viz., first, the shock of repulsion, then tolerance, and then, if often repeated, indifference.

The moral deterioration necessarily induced in those to whom suffering becomes a frequent spectacle is noted by the Englishman in Paris, from personal experience. After speaking of the inhumanity produced by the daily sight of blood in the originally honest bourgeois, who became the ‘Conventionnels’ of the French Revolution in 1793, he writes as follows: ‘I have witnessed three executions. After Pommeraye’s execution I was ill for a week; after Troppmann’s the effect soon wore off in three days; after Campa’s I ceased to think about it in twenty-four hours. Then I made a vow that no power on earth should draw me to the Place de la Roquette again. But men generally regard their growing imperviousness as a sign of mental force, and pride themselves upon it.’

In Marie Bashkertseff’s Journal is a striking passage which describes the effect of a Spanish bull-fight. She says: ‘I was able to maintain a tranquil air in full view of the butchery, carried on with the utmost refinement of cruelty. One leaves the scene slightly intoxicated with blood, and feeling desirous to thrust a lance into the neck of every person one meets. I stuck my knife into the melon I was cutting at table as if it were a banderilla I were planting in the hide of a bull, and the pulp seemed like the palpitating flesh of the wounded animal. The sight is one that makes the knees tremble and the head throb. It is a lesson in murder.’

The moral distinction between heroism shown when suffering is witnessed for the purpose of aiding the sufferer and that evinced for the selfish desire of individual gain or excitement, was strikingly exhibited by a German nurse whom we sent on to the army during the Civil War in America. This frail-looking woman drifted on to the front, and, after the Battle of Gettysburg, donning a pair of man’s boots, wading in pools of blood and mud, spent two days and nights on the field of slaughter, drawing out still breathing bodies from the heaps of slain, binding up wounds, giving a draught of water, placing a rough pillow under the head, in an unselfish enthusiasm that knew neither hunger nor fatigue. The ghastly wounds, the blood, the shrieks and groans of that horrid scene served but as fuel to the fire of humanity that consumed her.

The Effect on Teachers or Practitioners of Medicine.--In considering the subject of experimentation, reason requires that we realize the necessary distinction between the methods employed in training students for a practical profession and the exceptional position of the few geniuses who possess the rare combination of qualities essential to scientific investigation. In calling attention to this distinction we do not condone torture, for this can be proved to be unscientific. But it emphasizes a growing and mischievous evil of the present day when numbers of ordinary teachers of physiology, whose gifts are limited and whose especial business is to instruct students in the knowledge which has been attained, consider themselves capable of original scientific research, or attempt to repeat before either students or popular audiences so-called demonstrations on living creatures.

The showy plan of experimenting on animals is undoubtedly a great temptation to teachers. Such practice readily gains the gratifying applause of inexperienced learners, who are misled by an appearance of conclusiveness in the lectures, which they are quite incompetent to gauge. But the influence thus exercised is a harmful one, diverting the mind from right methods of study.

The temptation to make a display before imperfectly informed persons is too great. If the profession is to advance in popular esteem, it will recognise that the unfeeling destruction of living creatures, even the pithing of a frog or the dissection of the salivary glands of a living mouse, is a false method of forming the minds of students, which should be entirely abandoned.

We must here note the demand lately made by some leading members of the profession for increased facilities for experimentation on animals. Now, anyone who studies the Cruelty to Animals Bill (30 and 40 Vict.), which in 1876 licensed vivisection in Great Britain, will see how easy it now is to obtain a license, and how carefully the provisions of the Bill are arranged to give freedom to experimentation--in fact, to protect experimenters rather than their helpless victims. Thus, whilst in Section 2 a penalty of £100 or three months’ imprisonment is imposed for acts of cruelty, the Bill proceeds in Section 3 to give absolute freedom to every licensed person to torture, to mutilate, to disease to any extent if he considers it advisable to do so. In