tion, exclude it from the category of appliances for instruction. Yielding to none in my conviction of the indispensableness of experiments on animals to the prevention and healing of disease and injury, I believe that a higher and broader ground should be taken. "The knowledge of the human body," whether gained by dissection or by experiment, "belongs to every man, woman, and child, and has no more exclusive connection with physic than with law, engineering, or architecture." Consequently, had vivisection accomplished absolutely nothing for medicine or surgery, nevertheless experiments upon animals, necessarily painful in some cases, should be performed by competent persons for the advancement of physiological knowledge, just as experiments are done in chemical and physical research, and experiments, commonly painless, should be constantly employed in physiological teaching, simply because the information so imparted is more interesting, more intelligible, and more lasting than what is given in any other way[1] The spirit and methods of modern scientific teaching are well conveyed in the motto, "Iter longum per præcepta, breve per exempla," to which may be added the metric imitation of a familiar proverb, "A gramme of experiment is worth a kilogramme of talk." Logically, indeed, unless it be wrong to kill animals for the sake of mental acquisition, the exclusion of painless experiments from physiological teaching would be comparable with the abolition of museums, models, and vivaria of all kinds because most animals have been figured and described. On this point most persons will admit the force of Dr. Bartholow's query, "If animals are sacrificed for the support of men's bodies, why should they not contribute to the improvement of men's minds?"[2]
III. "An act for the more effectual prevention of cruelty to animals," passed April 12, 1867, embraces two sections relating to experimentation upon animals:
Section 1. If any person shall overdrive, overload, torture, torment, deprive of necessary sustenance, or unnecessarily[3] or cruelly beat, or needlessly mutilate or kill, or cause or procure to be overdriven, . . . or needlessly mutilated or killed, as aforesaid, any living creature, every such offender shall, for every such offense, be guilty of a misdemeanor. . . .
Sec. 10. Nothing in this act shall be construed to prohibit or interfere with any properly conducted scientific experiments or investigations, which experiments shall be performed only under the authority of some regularly incorporated medical college or university of the State of New York.
The following is the bill for the total suppression of vivisection
- ↑ As has been pithily stated by Huxley at the close of an article "On Elementary Instruction in Physiology," "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1877.
- ↑ Lecture reported in the "Medical Record," October 11, 1879, p. 342.
- ↑ Certain words of this and the following extracts are italicized with reference to comments which will be made presently.
