Section 11 It Gives Exceedingly Wide Scope for Procuring Licenses. by

Sections 7 to 10 it makes the efficient oversight of licensed persons almost impossible, and by the provisions of Sections 13 to 15 it virtually excludes the influence of growing humanitary conscience in the community from being exerted on the persons and places licensed. In short, the Bill would rather seem to be skilfully devised to give a free hand to persons who may call themselves ‘scientific’ than to protect living creatures who cannot protect themselves.

The plea put forward by the gentlemen referred to--viz., that medical progress is now hindered in England by restrictions--is practically a justification by them of the inhuman practices which prevail in France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, and in all countries where the conscience of the people has not been aroused to the moral and intellectual dangers involved in the torture of animals.

Surely these English physicians who demand entire freedom for vivisection do not realize what the result of foreign methods is. They cannot have noted the innumerable examples of atrocious cruelty which are occurring in the records of medical research as practised on the Continent and in America.

They cannot have taken note of such typical examples as the utterly useless barbarity of Senn of Philadelphia, setting fire to a dog that he had pumped full of hydrogen gas, before the Medical Congress of Berlin in 1890. Nor the experiments in massage on a series of large disjointed dogs performed in Professor Charles Richet’s Paris laboratory, not only with the permission, but with the consultative advice of that gentleman. A set of more unjustifiable experiments were never devised.

Certainly, no body of honourable English physicians who are in the habit of reading Les Archives Générales de Médecine would fail to condemn such fallacious experiments, where the pretence of anæsthesia served to diminish the resistance of the victims--not to annihilate pain.

Factors in Human Nature.--It must never be forgotten that gambling excitement or the spirit of undue emulation exists in all classes of men--in biological investigators as well as others--and it needs guidance or restraint.

The German officer Reizenstein felt keen remorse for the murder of his beautiful Irish mare Lippespringe, yet he and his companions tortured thirty horses to death under the temporary insanity of intense rivalry. But it was possible to bring public conscience to bear on this barbarity, and thus check the recurrence of any similar future aberration.

So in biological research we see the disastrous effects of individual and national rivalry. They are shown in the contradictory results of false methods of observation, in the endless repetition of similar painful experiments, in the strife of conflicting theories, and in the practical failure of results obtained from the lower animals when applied to the human race.

The moral sense of a noble profession may well be appealed to to create a conscience which shall check the present grave abuses of so-called research.