carry a breath as of Eden along with them. Of Eden did I say? Nay,
rather of the later Paradise for which the soul of the greatest of the
prophets yearned, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy
mountain.”
I will not attempt here to define how the sentiment of humanity to
the brutes, thoroughly ingrained into a man’s heart, would make him
decide the question of field sports. My own impression is that it would
lead him to abandon first, and with utter disgust, such wretched
amusements as pigeon-matches and _battues_ of half-tame pheasants;
and, later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and coursing
and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the sportsman with his hounds and
horse, or his greyhound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the
exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of his pursuit. In nine
kinds of such sports, I believe, out of ten, it is rather a case of
ill-divided sympathy for animals than of lack of it which inspires the
sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment where neither horse nor
dog had part,--like poor Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a
tub in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the period so spent as
“hours of delight!”
But there is one practice respecting which the influence of such a
sentiment of humanity as we have supposed must have an unmistakable
result. It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To accustom
ourselves and our children to regard animals with sympathy; to beware
of giving them pain, and rejoice when it is possible for us to give
them pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and trace the
dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts; to accept their services
and their affection, and give them in return such pledges of protection
as our kind words and caresses,--to do this, and then calmly consent
to hand them over to be dissected alive, this is too monstrous to be
borne. _De deux choses l’une._ Either we must cherish animals--and
then we must abolish vivisection--or we must sanction vivisection;
and then, for very shame’s sake, and lest we poison the springs of
pity and sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our children, we
must renounce the ghastly farce of petting or protecting animals, and
pretending to recognize their noble and lovable qualities. If love and
courage and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have no claim on us
to prevent us from dissecting that heart even while yet it beats with
affection; if the human-like intelligence working in a monkey’s brain
do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that brain, morsel
by morsel, till the last glimmering of mind and playfulness die out
in dulness and death,--if this be so, then, in Heaven’s name, let us
at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts
of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred
Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world.
The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand
advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception
of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable
for purposes of research,”--a mechanism, in short, of nerves and
muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a
pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which
thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its
followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the
opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal
in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We
cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower
must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no
question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture,
or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually
effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility;
or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over
a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called
“baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely
phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious,
sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless
matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It
is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely
taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into
a misfortune, which we denounce as a brutal misconception of the
relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter
anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred
years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no
claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing
them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries.
But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the
legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless
wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s
Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back
upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance
of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps
wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement
of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the
decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to
sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded
century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of
human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in
humanity” (pp. 195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle of mercy,
like that of freedom
“Once begun,
Though often lost, is always won.”
Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite in a resolution
that “vivisection is necessary,” just as all the Dominicans would
have united three hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-fé were
“necessary,” or as all the lawyers and magistrates that the _peine
forte et dure_ was “necessary,” or as the statesmen of America
did thirty years ago that negro slavery was “necessary,” yet the
“necessity” will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of
animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection are numbered.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on
good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains
in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding
his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near
giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in
the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in
miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying
in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of
her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth
the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her
last puppy only she had contrived to save.
[22] The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is
the charming and eloquent volume, _Rights of an Animal_, by E. B.
Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author
has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his
demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle
that cruelty to an animal is an offence _per se_, and that it is not
necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this
respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably
transcends the French _Loi Grammont_, which condemns only cruelty
exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson
justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely
painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that
delusion, _cadit quaestio_.
[23] As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in the
_Fortnightly Review_ for Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says,
“the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any
being depend on its ethical nature?”
[24] I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an
umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution
of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts
toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may
obtain my pamphlet, _The Right of Tormenting_, price 2_d._, at the
office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1
Victoria Street, Westminster.
[25] In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers,
are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work
in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed
warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be
instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The
mask is to be obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.
SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.
The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her
sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he
had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the
hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel
of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump
easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed
by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and
refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be
on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought
to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless
calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its
object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to
false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every
fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor them, and
closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might
explode them.
A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of
mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and
bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions
and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing
art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and
patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use
from the earliest period,--remedies of which it is a mild criticism
to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure.
Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really
free from antecedent convictions,--blank sheets of paper whereon
Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have
read and collated,--it is clear enough that good diet, exercise,
and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of
herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of
medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries
of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a
few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility,
have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make him
swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old
toads and earth-worms. The _un-_“scientific use of the imagination” can
alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious
prescriptions, prompted by some _a priori_ theory of what _ought_,
antecedently to experience, to be suitable for the cure of disease, and
“in accordance with the eternal fitness of things.”
What, then, were the notions in obedience to which these marvellous
remedies were ordained? If we exclude from present consideration
all the really useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by
genuine experience and recorded by the ancient physicians, Galen and
Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set
aside those which, though not really useful, might have been readily
mistaken for being so by imperfect early observation, we find the
immense residue of absurd and monstrous recipes to fall into two
categories; namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly and the
remedies which were either very painful or very disgusting. In other
words, a large part of the medical science of all past ages proves
that the doctors and their patients valued remedies _in proportion
to the price to be paid for them_, either in money or in suffering.
In short, they adopted freely the Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied
to medicine. Considering that Nature nearly always proceeds on
precisely the opposite track,--that she does not ask us “to do some
great thing,” but, like the true prophet, only bids us “wash and be
clean”; makes the cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome,
and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or loathing, the
surest test of the fitness or unfitness of food for our use,--there
is something exceedingly curious in the all but universal assumption
of mankind that it was only necessary to find something particularly
rare and expensive, or else something extraordinarily revolting, to
obtain a panacea for all the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in
the estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a great noble or
king should dissolve pearls in his drink or swallow liquid gold, and
yet, forsooth, be no better after all than a poor wretch who could
afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more incredible was
it that a man should submit to some agonizing scarification or actual
cautery, or should compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgusting
mess which his doctor had taken a year to concoct and distil through a
score of furnaces and retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no
more benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had only drunk some
cowslip julep or herb tea. Such tame and impotent conclusions could
not be received for a moment. If patients would only _pay_ enough or
_suffer_ enough, they _must_ be cured. This, it really seems, was the
underlying conviction of men of old, on which half the therapeutics of
past times were unconsciously based.
Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those
principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other
of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or
nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we
have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on
the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that
inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither
doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.
The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind of
_haute médecine_ necessarily of limited application. With the exception
of the great search for the _Aurum Potabile_ in the Middle Ages, there
are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in
which the patient _payait de sa personne_. Everybody could be scarified
or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients
who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases
of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grains of
that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved
pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against
melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires
for starting eyes, or St. Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other
troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age.
Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number
of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use
for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone.
Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive
of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against
epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26]
Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe
than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of
ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed
universally, useful as gold. He who could discover how to make men
actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing
less than the secret of immortality. The _Aurum Potabile_, or noble
“Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and
“Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to
be used in most diseases, _especially in chronick_.” By itself alone,
indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,--a
conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real
value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for
the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus
attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to
idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.
In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be
a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make
men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the
dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the
Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought
(not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible.
There was, it must be confessed, a profound _vulgarity_ in this whole
system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves
to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in
truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or
drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do
not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of
illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them
to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir
of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for
draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not,
represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a
whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table?
What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only
for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be
reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician,
brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for
five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever
use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in
every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a
medical man, in view of a patient’s straitened circumstances, telling
his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic
would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change
it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering
another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half
used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody
ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation
(possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the
regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and
that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed?
The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of
our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money
enough, a cure _must_ follow.
But, as I remarked before, the notion that costliness of itself is a
test of medicinal virtue has been, necessarily, far less prolific of
results than the kindred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed
on a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy applied to
his disease. As to disgust, it would really appear as if some ancient
prophets of the healing art, some Phœbus Epicurios or Æsculapius, must
have laid down as a principle for the selection of health-restoring
compounds and concoctions, “By their nauseousness ye shall know them.”
Else were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable witch-broths,
wherewith the older books of medicine are replete, quite unaccountable
on any theory of human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled patients
have swallowed by the ounce and the pound) were of a kind which it
is quite impossible to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells
us, the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the great rhetorician
Gorgias to accompany them and persuade their patients to take their
prescriptions. Let the following, however, be taken as moderate
examples:--
“Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou thinkest
most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate nothing of
its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other heterogeneous
substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar to a fit
consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and put
upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as may well
moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut close the
vessel and set it to putrifie, _in fimo equino_, for forty dayes that
it may ferment.” (The result is to be distilled, calcined, rectified,
and distilled over again and again, “seven times to separate its
phlegme,” till finally) “thou hast a pleasant [!!], safe, and noble
Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and restore health and
vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call for its final
dissolution and separation.”--_Aurora Chymica_, p. 6.
This was bad enough, but a great advance (in the line of sacrifice)
was made when to the mere odiousness, we may say beastliness, of the
dose _per se_ could be added the horror of eating what had once formed
part of a human body,--in short, of cannibalism. The _ordonnances_
which follow really seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites
of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of tracing them) might
be fathered on the earliest worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The
seasons of the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim must die
(very carefully defined in these prescriptions) seem to give color
to this view. Down to the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps
tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man in spring that
the nobles might eat his heart as a sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is
rather startling to find that just two hundred years ago in London the
physician in ordinary to the King recommended cannibalism to Englishmen
without the smallest apology or hesitation.
_A Mummiall Quintessence._
Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about
the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken
from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and
pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days.
Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with
spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no
dust or other filth may fall upon it. Be sure you often turn it,
and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for
use.--_Aurora Chymica_, chap. iii.
A still more efficacious remedy, “producing wonderful effects both
in preserving and restoring health,” may be obtained by distilling,
filtering, calcining, and coagulating this “Mummiall” till it have
a “saccharine taste,” when the “matter may be left of the thickness
or consistency of honey, which must be kept in glass vessels closely
shut.” (_Ibid._, p. 8.)
If the “sound young man” should have been killed in the spring instead
of in “the middle of August,” the learned Dr. Bolnest is not without a
remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for a “Mummiall,” but
his blood may be made into a “very high balsam, exceeding much the
powers and virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in time of
pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all sorts.”