snuffing, and chewing requires great skill and care, and is directed
by the tradition and experience of centuries. As is the case with
“hay,” the dried tobacco-leaf undergoes a kind of fermentation, and,
in fact, more than one such change. The cause of the fermentation is a
micro-organism which multiplies in the dead leaf and causes chemical
changes, just as the yeast organism grows in “wort” and changes it
to “beer.” It is said that the flavour and aroma of special tobaccos
is due to special kinds of ferment, and that by introducing the
Havannah ferment or micro-organism to tobacco-leaves grown away from
Cuba, you can give them much of the character of Havannah tobacco! A
very valuable kind of tobacco is the Roumelian, from which the best
Turkish cigarettes are made. It has a very delicate flavour, and very
small quantities of an aromatic kind prepared from a distinct variety
of tobacco plant grown near Ephesus and on the Black Sea (probably
a cultivated variety of Nicotiana rustica) are judiciously blended
with it. This blending, and the use of the very finest qualities of
tobacco-leaf, are essential points in the production of the best
Turkish cigarettes. The so-called “Egyptian” cigarettes are made from
less valuable Turkish tobacco, with the addition of an excess of the
aromatic kind. It is a mistake to suppose that opium or other matters
are used to adulterate tobacco. The only proceeding of the kind which
occurs is the mixing of inferior, cheap, and coarse-flavoured tobaccos
with better kinds. Water and also starch are used fraudulently to
increase the weight of leaf-tobacco. But skilful “blending” is a
legitimate and most important feature in the manufacture of cigars,
cigarettes, and smoking mixtures.
The first “smoking” of tobacco seen by Europeans was that of the Caribs
or Indians of San Domingo. They used a very curious sort of tubular
pipe, shaped like the letter Y. The diverging arms were placed one up
each nostril, and the end of the stem held in the smoke of burning
tobacco-leaves, which was thus “sniffed up” into the nose. The North
American Indians, on the other hand, had pipes very similar to those
still in use. The natives of South America smoked the rolled leaf
(cigars), chewed it, and took it as snuff.
It has been suggested that in Asia smoking of some kind of dried
herbs may have been a habit before tobacco was introduced--since even
Herodotus states that the Scythians were accustomed to inhale the
smoke of burning weeds, and showed their enjoyment of it by howling
like dogs! But investigation does not support the view that anything
corresponding to individual or personal “smoking” existed. “Bang” or
“hashish” (the Indian hemp) was not “smoked,” but swallowed as a kind
of paste before the introduction of tobacco-smoking in the East--as
we may gather from the stories of the “Arabian Nights”--although the
practice of smoking hemp (which is the chief constituent of “bang”) and
also of smoking the narcotic herb “henbane,” has now been established.
Opium was, and is, eaten in India, not “smoked.” The “smoking” of opium
is a Chinese invention of the eighteenth century.
The Oriental hookah suggests a history anterior to the use of tobacco,
but nothing is known of it. The word signifies a cocoanut-shell, and is
applied to the jar (sometimes actually a cocoanut) containing perfumed
water, through which smoke from a pipe, fixed so as to dip into the
water, is drawn by a long tube with mouthpiece. It seems possible that
this apparatus was in use for inhaling perfume by means of bubbles of
air drawn through rose-water or such liquids, before tobacco-smoking
was introduced, and that the tobacco-pipe and the perfume-jar were
then combined. But travellers before the year 1600 do not mention
the existence of the hookah in Persia or in India, though as soon as
tobacco came into use this apparatus is described by Floris, in 1614,
and by Olearius, in 1633, and by all subsequent travellers.
The conclusion to which careful inquiry has led is that though various
Asiatic races have appreciated the smoke of various herbs and enjoyed
inhaling it from time immemorial, yet there was no definite “smoking”
in earlier times. No pipes or rolled-up packets of dried leaves--to
be placed in the mouth and sucked whilst slowly burning--were in use
before the introduction of tobacco by Europeans, who brought the
tobacco-plant from America and the mode of enjoying its smoke, and
passed on its seeds to the people of Turkey, Persia, India, China, and
Japan.
41. _Cruelty, Pain and Knowledge_
It is difficult to write or to read or even to think about “cruelty”
and preserve one’s sober judgment and reason. Most people are upset
by emotion when torture and the details of the infliction of pain are
discussed. All the more must we remember that emotion is a powerful
driving force, but a bad guide. Only true knowledge and sound reasoning
can guide us aright.
An awful fact about the emotional state produced by witnessing or
hearing about the agonies of human beings or of sentient animals is
that to some people (actually very few and diminishing in number
among civilised races) it is distinctly a source of pleasure, though
to most of us it is intolerably painful. This fact forms one of the
most difficult problems of psychology. It seems that just as there
are people who enjoy seeing dangerous acrobatic performances or
climbing themselves among ice and rocks at the risk of their lives,
or reading of hairbreadth escapes, of bloody murders, of ghosts,
and other horrors--all of which are repulsive to the majority--so
there are some people who experience delicious shudderings--“des
frissons exquis”--when they see a man or an animal in torture or read
a description of such things. In the eighteenth century it was not
unusual for a country cousin on a visit to London to be taken as a
treat to see half a dozen men and boys hanged at Newgate, and then
to complete the happy day by a visit to Bedlam to see the madmen
flogged! Fortunately, public opinion and education seem to have been
able actually to alter the operation of the emotions excited by these
brutalities--so that to-day practically everyone in the Western States
of Europe regards the unnecessary infliction of pain with horror and
indignation, and is anxious to avoid witnessing pain, even in cases
where it is a necessary evil.
It is a mistake to suppose that there is any tendency on the part of
scientific men or medical men to be callous or indifferent to the
infliction of pain. The surgeon sometimes has to inflict pain in order
to prevent greater future pain or death--but he is not indifferent to
the pain he causes. He is not even “cruel only to be kind”--but appears
cruel to the unthinking because he has to give pain which he knows will
save his patient from far greater pain, and he has to maintain a calm
and determined attitude in order to help those around him to exercise
self-control. The medical art is, above all things, an art of removing
and abolishing pain, and its practitioners are all the more sensitive
concerning pain because they know more and see more of it than other
people, and make it their chief business to alleviate suffering.
Charles Darwin took a prominent part twenty-five years ago in urging
the Government of the day not to make a law which would prevent
physiologists and medical men from obtaining knowledge as to animal
life and disease by experiment. The great naturalist was a great lover
of animals and a most gentle and tender-hearted man. He wrote to me
in 1870: “Experiment must, of course, be allowed for the progress of
physiology and medicine, but not for damnable and detestable curiosity.
I will write no more about it, or I shall not sleep to-night.” Mr.
Darwin was alluding to horrible so-called “experiments” which in former
days--especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century--were
made by utterly irresponsible and ignorant amateurs, witnessed by
fashionable ladies, and reported in the newspapers and letters of the
day. It is these reckless and useless “experiments” which rightly
excited horror and opposition a century ago, and were described by the
name “vivisection.” We have to thank these blundering philosophers
of the salons of a past age for the mistaken feeling with which some
people regard the really valuable and careful investigations which
are made by medical men at the present day, with the use of every
precaution to prevent pain to the animals used.
The testing of drugs, the inoculation of parasitic disease, and the
trial of different modes of removing or controlling the disease
so inoculated, carried on by highly trained and learned men, who
thoroughly know what they are about, and who communicate with one
another from all parts of the world as to the progress they are making
in curing or even abolishing diseases, such as diphtheria, cholera,
sleeping sickness, and phthisis are very different from the impudent
unscientific “experiments” of the days of Horace Walpole. The inquiries
carried on in the modern laboratories of our great universities should
not for a moment be confused with the horrors performed to glorify
and show the superior cold-bloodedness of drawing-room pretenders to
science, in those strange times.
I believe that most sensible people feel as Mr. Darwin felt, and I
myself would certainly subscribe to what he wrote to me in the letter
which I have quoted above. Amongst those who feel thus strongly on
the subject there are some who can control their emotion and calmly
consider whether the pain inflicted under any given circumstances is
justifiable as leading to a great ultimate diminution of pain by the
knowledge obtained. There are others who are constitutionally incapable
of controlling their emotion in this matter. They hear dreadful stories
of cruelty, and are so upset that they are incapable of ascertaining
whether the stories are true or not. They are quite unfit to weigh the
question as to whether the pain given in the case they hear of may or
may not be a necessary step towards avoiding far greater pain in the
future for thousands of human beings and sentient animals. Far be it
from me to think harshly of these tender-hearted people, though their
mistaken outcry may tend to stop the discovery of pain-saving and
life-saving knowledge. I feel more sympathy with them than with those
(happily rare) individuals who are really indifferent to seeing or
giving bodily pain to men or to animals.
There is reason to hope that careful and well-considered statement
of the facts will eventually enable many of those who are mentally
unhinged by descriptions of pain and bloodshed to recognise that they
have been deceived, partly by their own fancies and partly by the false
statements of professional agitators. Unfortunately, there are always
present in human society individuals who find it to their advantage
to excite the minds of their more emotional fellow-citizens by tales
of horror. The lust of such power--the power to lead or urge a large
body of men driven by emotional excitement into violent action--has led
from time to time to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and elaborate
plot and perjury directed against a group of innocent or worthy people,
whose proceedings were mysterious or misunderstood by the community
at large. Thus, from time to time, the crowd has been infuriated and
led to the murder of the Jews by agitators, who started the baseless
story that the Jews had slain a Christian child, and used its blood at
their feast of the Passover. Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon made
use of the unreasoning emotion of the crowd in the same way. To a less
serious extent the emotional unreasonableness of a number of men and
women is being played upon at the present day by quite a large variety
of agitators, would-be leaders of crusades and campaigns against the
beneficent work of the physiological and medical laboratories of our
universities and medical schools.
There are one or two other features about “cruelty” and the mental
conditions leading to and arising from it, which, however uncanny and
troubling, should be carefully considered when public opinion is roused
in regard to its repression. Among these is the fact that the word is
freely applied to the mere infliction of pain without consideration
of the question as to whether there is a guilty mind determining it.
Storms and frosts are called “cruel” by poetic license; but it is
probably quite wrong to call a cat or a tiger cruel. These animals take
pleasure in playing with their prey, as they would with an inanimate
ball or mechanical toy. There is no reason to suppose that they are
conscious of the infliction of pain or take pleasure in pain as pain.
And so it must happen sometimes with thoughtless human beings who
disregard the pain which they cause, when eagerly engaged in “sport” or
in the pursuit of some all-absorbing and consuming purpose. The whole
subject of cruelty is a distressing one, but should not on that account
be misapprehended or dealt with wildly and blindly.
Twenty-five years ago a Royal Commission sat which was appointed to
inquire as to what restrictions, if any, it was desirable to place upon
the practice of making experiments on animals for physiological and
medical purposes. As a result of its labours an Act of Parliament was
passed which made definite regulations for the purpose of preventing
unqualified persons from indulging in reckless experiments on animals.
There were stories circulated by the agitators then--as there are
now--to the effect that medical students perform horrible and painful
operations (vivisections, as the agitators term them,) on live animals
in secret or with the connivance of their teachers. It was proved
twenty-five years ago that these stories were false. At the same time
an elaborate law was passed to satisfy the emotional persons misled
by the agitators, which made it necessary for an experimenter (1) to
have a licence (dependent on a certificate as to his competency); (2)
that he should use anæsthetics; and (3) that experiments should only be
carried out in licensed laboratories.
The agitators of the present day have by heart-rending stories, similar
to those told twenty-five years ago, produced a similar excitement and
a similar result, namely, a Royal Commission on Vivisection, which has
been occupied for a year and a half in listening to the statements and
delusions of those who declare that the law made twenty-five years
ago is insufficient, and that all sorts of cruelties are committed by
the physiologists and doctors. The Commission has also questioned the
leading physiologists and medical men in the country, and listened to
their voluntary statements. I have seen the very voluminous report of
the evidence thus given on both sides. The various accusations made
against the medical men in the conduct of their laboratories have been
carefully gone into. It is contended, on their side, that these charges
are based on misunderstanding--the misunderstanding which one would
expect from an ignorant person with a strong feeling or prejudice in
the direction of the misunderstanding. For instance, the fact that
chloroform is administered and the animal rendered insensible when
operated on, has been overlooked in some of the accounts which excited
the so-called “antivivisectors”--notably in the misleading account of
“the brown dog.” The whole of the evidence should be read by those who
are really in doubt on the matter. Probably it will not be long before
the Commission reports, and its conclusions will command the very
greatest respect, not only because its members include eminent lawyers,
medical men and independent representatives who were ready to give an
impartial mind to the inquiry, but also because it is obvious that the
very greatest care has been taken to obtain the fullest evidence from
both sides.
Sir James Fletcher Moulton, one of the Lords Justices of the Court of
Appeal, has made a statement to the Commission in defence of scientific
experiment which is a masterpiece of persuasive reasoning and lucid
exposition. It is somewhat remarkable that there have been and are
persons in high judicial office who have shown active hostility to the
cause of science and knowledge in this matter owing to their want of
acquaintance with the facts and their readiness to be carried away by
blind emotion. Lord Justice Moulton, on the other hand, is a scientific
man by education and early training, and has come forward to state in a
plain and reasonable way what is the view of the matter which commends
itself to him. There is reason to hope that his view will be approved
by those who read what he says calmly and without bias. His chief point
is that many people are willing to admit that it is right to destroy
animals (even by methods which inflict great pain on them) when an
immediate result of a good and useful kind is to be obtained--as when
we kill animals to serve as food or in order to prevent them from
injuring us or destroying our crops and stores. Yet these same persons,
he points out, by some defect of imagination are unable to see that the
gaining of pain-saving or disease-preventing knowledge as the result
of inflicting pain and death on a small number of animals justifies
us in permitting that pain and death. They are unable to admit the
justification because the knowledge and its practical application
does not directly and at once follow upon the first commencement of
the search for it, and they have not sufficient acquaintance with
the matter to enable them to realise and confidently believe that the
beneficent result will ensue. The knowledge has to be built up step
by step, and the infliction of pain on the animals is separated by an
appreciable lapse of time from the beneficent result--which is none the
less the result which was aimed at, and the true consequence of the
pain inflicted. Putting aside for the moment the fact that in these
inquiries the pain is reduced to a minimum by the use of anæsthetics,
it would seem that we ought to be able to recognise that the causing of
a certain amount of pain to many hundreds of rabbits, and even dogs,
is justified by the consequent removal of a far greater amount of pain
from thousands of men and animals who are saved from suffering at a
later date by the knowledge so gained.
Lord Justice Moulton suggests two cases of the infliction of pain on
animals for comparison. Suppose, he says, a ship to arrive in port
which (as might easily happen to-day) is infested by plague-stricken
rats; there are, perhaps, ten or twenty thousand rats on board. If
the rats escaped and landed they might (not certainly, but probably)
infect a whole city, even a much larger area, with plague, and cause
death and disaster to thousands of human beings. Everyone will agree
that the owner of the ship would be justified in destroying all the
rats on the ship by sulphur fumes, or whatever other painful method
might be necessary to prevent even one from escaping. A vast amount
of suffering would be inflicted on the rats in order to prevent a far
greater contingent amount of suffering. Now suppose that a man, by
infecting some hundreds of rats and other animals with plague, and by
trying various experiments on these animals with curative drugs, and
by other operations upon them, can in all probability arrive at such
a knowledge of plague and how to check it as to enable us to arrest
its propagation, and so to save thousands, or even millions, of human
beings from this painful and deadly disease, are we to say that this
investigator must not carry on his studies, must not find out how
to stop plague in future because to do so he will have to give some
amount of pain to a hundred or more animals? Clearly, if we justify
the shipowner we must justify the inquiries and experiments of the
medical discoverer. In both cases we must hold--every sane man really
does hold--that it is right to inflict pain with the expectation (not
a certainty in either case, but only a reasonable probability) of
preventing a far larger and more serious amount of pain in the future.
It is the choice of the lesser of two evils.
And thus we are led to admit that it is right that experiments and
studies attended with some pain to animals should be carried on, on
condition that competent and serious persons make them, for the purpose
of gaining increased knowledge of the processes of life and disease.
Such studies have already yielded great results--the pain in the wards
of hospitals and in sick rooms is not a tenth of what it was a hundred
years ago. The death-rate of great cities is a third less than it was
fifty years ago. Modern medicine and modern surgery are really and
demonstrably immense agencies for preventing pain and the anguish and
misery which is caused by untimely death.
A Society for the Defence of Research has been established this year
(1908) with the Earl of Cromer as its president. The Society has
issued some valuable pamphlets showing what improvements in medical
knowledge have been recently effected by means of inoculations and
other experiments in which animals have been used though subjected to
as little pain and discomfort as consistent with the enquiries made.
Ignorant opponents of medical research assert that the scientific
study of the processes of life and disease in laboratories has not
helped in the great progress in medical practice which marks the
last fifty years. But the medical men who are the leaders of their
profession unanimously assert, and prove by detailed accounts of the
discoveries made, that such study has been essential to the progress
established, and is essential for further progress. Lord Lister, who
by his antiseptic method of treating surgical wounds has saved more
pain to present and future generations of men than all the torturers
of the Inquisition ever inflicted or dreamed of inflicting, has been
the leader in declaring the inestimable value to humanity--in fact,
the absolute necessity--of physiological experiments on animals. Whose
judgment on this question can be considered of greater value than his?
The anti-vivisection agitators, for the purpose of exciting the
emotions of those who listen to them, use the word “torture” as
describing the action of such men as Pasteur and Lord Lister. To
torture is to inflict an ever-increasing amount of pain, with the view
of “extorting” a submission, a confession, or treasure from a victim.
To suggest that scientific and medical men apply pain in this way, and
to spread the word “torture” among the ignorant, emotional public, in
connection with their inquiries, is dishonest as well as ungrateful.
One valuable result of the work of the present Royal Commission on what
is called “Vivisection,” but should be called “the use of animals in
the discovery of means of controlling disease and alleviating pain,”
is that it is made quite clear that there is very little pain at all
inflicted in this beneficent work, owing to the fact that anæsthetics
and narcotics are administered to the animals when anything which might
cause pain is done. I do not hesitate to say that there is in this
country less pain caused in a whole year in all the laboratories where
this great work for the public good is carried on than in a single
day’s rabbit-shooting.