I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives are easy
enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet learns that if
he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe--and without doing that
he can rule them--he must terrify or revolt them from time to time by
acts of hideous cruelty or disgusting unnaturalness. We are far from
being as superior to such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful
indeed whether Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made
in Russia if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by
his monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a
nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for some
huge accidental calamity: a cholera epidemic, a war, or an insurrection,
before waking us up sufficiently to get anything done. Vivisection helps
the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the Russians. The notion that the
man who does dreadful things is superhuman, and that therefore he can
also do wonderful things either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not,
is by no means confined to barbarians. Just as the manifold wickednesses
and stupidities of our criminal code are supported, not by any general
comprehension of law or study of jurisprudence, not even by simple
vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity of any sort must
be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the wickednesses and stupidities
of our medicine men are rooted in superstitions that have no more to do
with science than the traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad
has to do with the effectiveness of its armament. We have only to turn
to Macaulay's description of the treatment of Charles II in his last
illness to see how strongly his physicians felt that their only chance
of cheating death was by outraging nature in tormenting and disgusting
their unfortunate patient. True, this was more than two centuries ago;
but I have heard my own nineteenth-century grandfather describe the
cupping and firing and nauseous medicines of his time with perfect
credulity as to their beneficial effects; and some more modern
treatments appear to me quite as barbarous. It is in this way that
vivisection pays the doctor. It appeals to the fear and credulity of the
savage in us; and without fear and credulity half the private doctor's
occupation and seven-eighths of his influence would be gone.