care and wise instruction we can prevent much of the sickness and sorrow of the race, and bid back the Angel of Death.
Hygiene—well named after Hygeia, the goddess of good health—must be one of your principal future studies, and its lessons ever on your lips; line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, and there a great deal. The greatest need of our College to-day is a Professorship of Hygiene. Would that in this vast audience some one could be found who would endow such a chair in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania!
You must also direct public opinion, and especially the opinion of your own sex, in reference to medical questions; for your information and studies will fit you to be their instructors in all such technical questions.
It is to one of these medical issues of the day that I purpose to direct your attention at present—one as to which intense feeling, especially among women, has been aroused—viz., the question of experiments upon animals.
Epithets and invective have been freely used, but, as befits the audience and the occasion, I shall endeavor to approach it in a perfectly calm and fair spirit, seeking to lay before you only one aspect of a many-sided question, viz., the actual practical benefits it has conferred upon man and animals—a fact that is constantly denied, but which medical evidence proves to be incontestable.
I shall not consider the important older discoveries it has given us, but only those since 1850, almost all of which are within my own personal recollection. Even of these I must omit nearly all of its contributions to physiology and to pathology, though so much of our practice is based upon these, and confine myself to the advances it has enabled us to make in medical and surgical practice. I shall endeavor to state its claims with moderation, for an extravagant claim always produces a revulsion against the claimant, and is as unwise as it is unscientific.
Again, it must be borne in mind that, as in nearly every other advance in civilization and in society, so in medicine, causes are rarely single, but generally multiple and interwoven. While vivisection has been a most potent factor in medical progress, it is only one of several factors the disentanglement of which and the exact balancing of how much is due to this or to that are often difficult and sometimes impossible. Let me add one word more. All that I may say is purely upon my own responsibility. I commit the opinion of no one else to any view or any statement of fact.
Medicine in the future must either grow worse, stand still, or grow better.
To grow worse, we must forget our present knowledge—happily, an inconceivable idea.
