The importance to our doctors of a reputation for the tenderest humanity
is so obvious, and the quantity of benevolent work actually done by them
for nothing (a great deal of it from sheer good nature) so large, that
at first sight it seems unaccountable that they should not only throw
all their credit away, but deliberately choose to band themselves
publicly with outlaws and scoundrels by claiming that in the pursuit of
their professional knowledge they should be free from the restraints of
law, of honor, of pity, of remorse, of everything that distinguishes
an orderly citizen from a South Sea buccaneer, or a philosopher from
an inquisitor. For here we look in vain for either an economic or a
sentimental motive. In every generation fools and blackguards have
made this claim; and honest and reasonable men, led by the strongest
contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its crude rascality.
From Shakespear and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and Mark Twain, the natural
abhorrence of sane mankind for the vivisector's cruelty, and the
contempt of able thinkers for his imbecile casuistry, have been
expressed by the most popular spokesmen of humanity. If the medical
profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general
professional protest against the practice and principles of the
vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the
immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance
of the humanity of the doctor. Not one doctor in a thousand is a
vivisector, or has any interest in vivisection, either pecuniary or
intellectual, or would treat his dog cruelly or allow anyone else to do
it. It is true that the doctor complies with the professional fashion of
defending vivisection, and assuring you that people like Shakespear and
Dr. Johnson and Ruskin and Mark Twain are ignorant sentimentalists,
just as he complies with any other silly fashion: the mystery is, how
it became the fashion in spite of its being so injurious to those who
follow it. Making all possible allowance for the effect of the brazen
lying of the few men who bring a rush of despairing patients to their
doors by professing in letters to the newspapers to have learnt from
vivisection how to cure certain diseases, and the assurances of the
sayers of smooth things that the practice is quite painless under the
law, it is still difficult to find any civilized motive for an attitude
by which the medical profession has everything to lose and nothing to
gain.