George Jean Nathan, in that immortal document _Pistols for Two_ in
which he and Monsieur Mencken, using the cognomen Maj. Owen Hatteras,
gave an unsuspecting world an insight into their personal characters
and characteristics, tells us which of his aphorisms delights him most.
Of all the soul-searching mots perpetrated by this astute coiner of
phrases, the one he selected is likewise the one that gives me most
joy. “An antivivisectionist,” said Dr. Nathan, “is a woman who strains
at a guinea pig and swallows a baby.” There it is in a nutshell! A
Freudian might claim that the term “nutshell” was prominent in my mind
because I was discussing the antivivisectionist.
At a period when the whole world begins to turn to science as the
real goal of mankind; when intelligent human beings begin to discard
pseudo-sentiment for fact, the followers of what is essentially merely
an illogical, fanatical cult continue to oppose progress if it is to
involve in any way what they conceive to be abuse of the lower animals
for purposes of study. This opposition seems to rest invariably
on a lack of actual knowledge of what animal experimentation has
accomplished for mankind, of what it has contributed to the life and
comfort of the animal, of the extent to which the animal may suffer
in the cause of experimentation, and of the very rules which the
scientists themselves have elaborated to safeguard their work with
animals.
It is impossible in the scope of a brief article even to enumerate all
that has been learned by animal experimentation. Without the aid of
this method Pasteur could not have founded the science of bacteriology;
such diseases as hydrophobia, tuberculosis, yellow fever, plague,
scarlet fever, diphtheria and diabetes would not have passed under
the control of scientific medicine but would have continued to take
their immense toll of life and to cause immeasurable economic loss
through illness. Indeed, to calculate the sums saved and earned through
preventing illness, through opening up countries constantly menaced
by disease, through the building of the Panama Canal, and through the
saving of workers in industry, would produce a figure so vast as to be
almost incredible.
Anyone who has seen a child, succumbing to the gradual encroachment
of the diphtheric membrane in its throat, suddenly respond to the
marvelous effects of diphtheria antitoxin will oppose to the utmost
any attempt to deprive that child of the remedy. In preparing
antitoxin the horse is required for the production of the serum and
the guinea pig for standardization. I have seen the horses used for
such service. Their paths are spread in pleasant places. They toil
not at all, they are kept clean, they frolic in the open air except
when the weather may be inclement. They are well fed and given the
best of attention. I have seen the serum withdrawn and seen the horse
make no more visible sign of protest than is made by the average man
when he sticks his finger on a pin in the back of his wife’s dress. I
have seen guinea pigs by the thousands utilized for this work. If I
am any judge of guinea pig emotions they do not suffer unduly in the
process. I have never seen a guinea pig suffer as much as a hysterical
antivivisectionist suffers at a dog and pony show or a circus.
Before the discovery of the serum for epidemic meningitis from fifty
to seventy-five percent of all who were afflicted died. When the serum
is given the mortality is below twenty-five percent of those affected,
and this says nothing of the saving in illness and in permanently
disabling after effects. In the investigation which led to this
discovery rabbits, guinea pigs, horses and monkeys were employed. In
a war, nations sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of their
finest young men; the people are told that the sacrifice is made so
that women and children may have a safe place in which to live. Shall
the lives of rabbits and guinea pigs be weighed against the lives of
the same children threatened by far greater dangers than those of war:
the dangers of infectious disease? Puerperal infection which killed the
woman in childbirth was controlled through animal experimentation. What
about saving women from that menace?
It is not alone the so-called biological remedies such as antitoxins,
vaccines and serums that are dependent on animal experimentation. Most
of the potent drug remedies used today for the alleviation and cure of
disease must be tested and standardized by the use of animals. Most
of our important synthetic drugs were first evolved only by the use
of animals. The anesthetics such as ether, chloroform, ethylene and
nitrous oxide gas have the same effects on animals that they have on
man. Was it not right that they should be tested first on animals? Such
drugs as digitalis, which makes the lives of many persons suffering
from heart disease endurable, have to be standardized by animal tests.
Shall the poisonous doses of potent drugs be learned by tests made on
the white rat or the guinea pig or on man; or worse still, shall we
permit men to die or suffer mutilation to spare the feelings of the
white mouse? Isn’t it after all a question of sparing the hyperesthetic
sensibilities of some idle woman rather than the duller sensibilities
of some lower animal?
One by one the infectious diseases that attack man are being brought
under control. There still remain those incurable diseases such as
cancer, those conditions such as Bright’s disease, high blood pressure,
heart disease and diabetes, which may be alleviated but have not been
completely conquered. Shall the methods that have brought success in
the control of some diseases be discarded at the whim of misguided
and unreasoning followers of this cult opposed to human progress? Of
course, animal experimentation never will be discarded. After all, the
progress of scientific medicine is a powerful movement sweeping on and
on with ever increasing impetus.