THE GREAT PROTESTANT AGAINST VIVISECTION CRUELTY
Among the critics of unlimited vivisection one American name of the
present century stands pre-eminently above all others, not only for
emphasis of denunciation, for vigour of condemnation, for clear
distinctions between right and wrong, but also for the distinguished
position which the writer held. Forty years ago in the medical
profession of the United States no name stood higher than that of
Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, the professor of surgery in Harvard University.
To estimate the value of his criticism it is necessary to outline his
career.
He was born in Boston, March 11, 1818, his father being Dr. Jacob
Bigelow, one of the leading physicians of his day. After completing
his medical education in America, young Bigelow went abroad, and spent
nearly three years studying in the great hospitals of Paris. It was
at a period when the cruel vivisections of Magendie and his
contemporaries had become the scandal of civilization, and there can
be no doubt that Dr. Bigelow witnessed every phase of vivisection that
his sensibilities permitted him to observe.
Returning to Boston in 1844, the young surgeon rapidly attained a
prominent position. In January, 1846, before he had completed his
twenty-eighth year, he was appointed visiting surgeon of the
Massachusetts General Hospital. Here on November 7, 1846, there
occurred one of the greatest historic events--the first surgical
operation in which insensibility to pain was secured by the inhalation
of ether. Dr. Bigelow's enthusiasm for the new discovery was very
great, and it has been said that to him "the world was indebted for
the introduction of anaesthesia in surgery at the exact time in which
it occurred."
Dr. Bigelow was surgeon to the Massachusetts General Hospital from
1846 to 1886--a period of forty years. He was professor of surgery in
Harvard University from 1849 to 1882, or a third of a century. When
he resigned the latter position, President Eliot in his annual report
referred to him as "a discoverer and inventor of world-wide
reputation, a brilliant surgical operator, a natural leader of men."
The faculty of Harvard Medical School also spoke of him as one "who
had done so much to render this school conspicuous and to make
American surgery illustrious throughout the world." This is high
praise. Let it be remembered in reading his opinions concerning
vivisection.
An abhorrence of pain was a marked trait in Dr. Bigelow's character.
Even to the infliction of necessary suffering he had an extreme
dislike. His gentleness to animals was akin to his tenderness for
children. He had a great respect for their intelligence, their
affection, their confidence in mankind. Toward the close of life he
had among his pets a number of the little animals most closely related
to human beings, and therefore the most-prized "material" of the
vivisector. But such was Dr. Bigelow's sympathy with his little
friends that he disliked to take visitors into their presence, and
when he did, always cautioned them to assume a smiling face. He was
unwilling to give his pets even the mental suffering of anxiety or
fear.
He died October 30, 1890, at the ripe age of seventy-two. It was
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself illustrious in science and in
literature, who referred to the name of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow as "one
of the brightest in the annals of American surgery, not to claim for
it A STILL HIGHER PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THE HEALING ART."
Such a tribute was well deserved. His was the most eminent name in
the annals of American surgery. It was from this man, occupying such
a position in the medical profession, that we have one of the
strongest protests, one of the clearest, most discriminating, and
emphatic criticisms of unregulated and unrestricted vivisection that
the world has known. It is particularly valuable, because Dr. Bigelow
was never an antivivisectionist, if by that term we mean one who is
opposed to all experiments upon animals. But there are things done in
the name of Science which he utterly repudiated and condemned as
cruelty, and against which he made a protest that should never be
forgotten until the evil shall be condemned by the universal judgment
of mankind.
It is probable that Dr. Bigelow's first protest against the abuses of
vivisection was in course of an address delivered before the
Massachusetts Medical Society in 1871. It is not difficult, perhaps,
to detect the reason for its utterance. Dr. H. P. Bowditch, for very
many years afterward the professor of physiology in Harvard Medical
School, graduated in 1868 from that institution, and went abroad to
study physiology in Europe. There he remained about three years, and
on his return in 1871 he was given the opportunity of introducing
laboratory methods and all the newer processes of experimentation into
Harvard Medical School. Now, the address from which the following
extracts are taken was delivered on May 7, 1871. Perhaps the
inference is not an unreasonable one that Dr. Bigelow was here
protesting, and protesting in vain, against the introduction in
America of those methods of vivisection which he always regarded with
abhorrence and detestation.
In this address he says:
"The teacher of the art of healing has no more right to employ the
time of the ignorant student disproportionately in the pleasant and
seductive paths of laboratory experimentation--because some of these
may one day lead to pathology or therapeutics--than a guardian has to
invest the money of his ward in stocks or securities of equally
uncertain prospective value to him.
"How few facts of immediate considerable value to our race have of
late years been extorted from the dreadful sufferings of dumb animals,
the cold-blooded cruelties now more and more practised under the
authority of science!
"The horrors of vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the
thrilling fascination of the old unetherized operation upon the human
sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological
inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present value to
man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium,
perhaps to be confuted the next year, perhaps to remain a fixed truth
of immediate value,-- ... CONTEMPTIBLY SMALL COMPARED WITH THE PRICE
PAID FOR IT IN AGONY AND TORTURE.
"For every inch cut by one of these experimenters in the quivering
tissues of the helpless dog or rabbit or guinea-pig, let him insert a
lancet one-eighth of an inch into his own skin, and for every inch
more he cuts let him advance the lancet another one-eight of an inch;
and whenever he seizes, with ragged forceps, a nerve or spinal marrow,
the seat of all that is concentrated and exquisite in agony, or
literally tears out nerves by their roots, let him cut only one-eight
of an inch farther--and he may have some faint suggestion of the
atrocity he is perpetrating when the guinea-pig shrieks, the poor dog
yells, the noble horse groans and strains--the heartless vivisector
perhaps resenting the struggle which annoys him.
"My heart sickens as I recall the spectacle at Alfort in former times,
of a wretched horse--one of many hundreds, broken with age and disease
resulting from life-long and honest devotion to man's service--bound
upon the floor, his skin scored with a knife like a gridiron, his eyes
and ears cut out, his arteries laid bare, his nerves exposed and
pinched and severed, his hoofs pared to the quick, and every
conceivable and fiendish torture inflicted upon him, while he groaned
and gasped, his life carefully preserved under this continued and
hellish torment from early morning until afternoon, for the purpose,
as was avowed, of familiarizing the pupil with the frenzied motions of
the animal. This was surgical vivisection on a little larger scale,
AND TRANSCENDED BUT LITTLE THE SCENES IN A PHYSIOLOGICAL LABORATORY.
I have heard it said that somebody must do it. I say it is needless.
NOBODY SHOULD DO IT. WATCH THE STUDENTS AT A VIVISECTION; IT IS THE
BLOOD AND SUFFERING, not the science, that rivet their breathless
attention. If hospital service makes young students less tender of
suffering, vivisection deadens their humanity, and begets indifference
to it."
Let us pause for a moment. These are words of great import. They are
as true to-day as when first uttered. Who was the speaker? The most
eminent surgeon in America in his day. He was professor of surgery in
Harvard University, and the leading member of its faculty. He was the
surgeon of the Massachusetts General Hospital. He had seen the first
surgical operation under complete anaesthesia that the world had
known. Learned societies in Paris, in London, in other countries of
Europe, were proud to number him among their members. He had reached
the age of assured eminence, where all fear of opposing influences
that might disastrously affect the medical career of a younger man,
had no weight. Surely, if any living man can speak with authority, he
speaks now.
And before whom does he speak? He is not addressing a general
audience. It is a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, an
association of the physicians and surgeons of that Commonwealth. Some
of them had also seen vivisection as practised in Paris and Leipsic.
Here was a man at the head of their profession protesting against the
introduction of the vivisection laboratory system in his own country.
He insists over and over again that we cannot tell the degree of agony
inflicted by experiments upon the nervous system, nor measure its
intensity:
"Who can say whether a guinea-pig, the pinching of whose carefully
sensitized neck throws him into convulsions, attains this blessed
momentary respite of insensibility by an unexplained special machinery
of the nervous currents, OR A SENSIBILITY TOO EXQUISITELY ACUTE FOR
ANIMAL ENDURANCE? Better that I or my friend should die than protract
existence through accumulated years of torture upon animals whose
exquisite suffering we cannot fail to infer, even though they may have
neither voice nor feature to express it."
It is not the fact of suffering, but the useless waste of suffering
that chiefly repels him:
"If a skilfully constructed hypothesis could be elaborated up to the
point of experimental test by the most accomplished and successful
philosopher, and if then a single experiment, though cruel, would
forever settle it, we might reluctantly admit that it was justified.
But the instincts of our common humanity indignantly remonstrate
against the testing of clumsy or unimportant hypotheses by prodigal
experimentation, or MAKING THE TORTURE OF ANIMALS AN EXHIBITION TO
ENLARGE A MEDICAL SCHOOL, or for the entertainment of students--not
one in fifty of whom can turn it to any profitable account. The limit
of such physiological experiment, in its utmost latitude, should be to
establish truth in the hands of a skilful experimenter, and not to
demonstrate it to ignorant classes and encourage them to repeat it."
One cannot but remark the clear distinction of views which these words
indicate. No antivivisectionist would accept the suggestion of a
single experiment. Dr. Bigelow is speaking as a restrictionist
against the free and unlimited vivisection which he rightly foresaw
was about to be introduced into this country, and which has become the
practice of the present day. He realizes that if once the laboratory
system gains a foothold in his own college, the system will spread
throughout America:
"The reaction which follows every excess will in time bear indignantly
upon this. Until then it is dreadful to think how many poor animals
will be subjected to excruciating agony as one medical college after
another becomes penetrated with the idea that vivisection is a part of
modern teaching, and that, to hold way with other institutions, they,
too, must have their vivisector, their mutilated dogs, their guinea-
pigs, their rabbits, their chamber of torture and of horrors, to
advertise as a laboratory."
Nor this the only expression of Dr. Bigelow's opinions. In his work
on "Surgical Anaesthesia," he left on record an even stronger
condemnation of the abuses of vivisection and the cruelties which
pertain to it. As he quotes from Stanley's "In Darkest Africa," which
was published in 1890, it is evident that it represents his mature and
settled judgment, down to the very close of his long and distinguished
career. In this work he says:
"There can be no question that the discussion of vivisection arouses
antagonistic human instincts. It is no common subject which enlists
such earnest and opposite opinions. That there is something wrong
about it is evident from the way in which the reputation of inflicting
its torture is disclaimed. That for some reason it is a fascinating
pursuit is equally evident from the bitter contest made for the right
to practise it.
"There is little in the literature of what is called the `horrors of
vivisection' which is not well grounded on truth. For a description
of the pain inflicted, I refer to that literature, only reiterating
that what it recounts is largely and simply fact, selected, it may be,
but rarely exaggerated.
"Vivisection is not an innocent study. We may usefully popularize
chemistry and electricity, their teaching and their experimentation,
even if only as one way of cultivating human powers. But not so with
painful vivisection. We may not move as freely in this direction, for
there are distinct reasons against it. It can be indiscriminately
pursued only by torturing animals; and the word `torture' is here
intentionally used to convey the idea of very severe pain--sometimes
the severest conceivable pain, of indefinite duration, often
terminating, fortunately for the animal, with its life, but as often
only after hours or days of refined infliction, continuously or at
intervals."
It is here that Dr. Bigelow differs radically from the advocates of
free vivisection. To them there appears no reason why the science of
physiology should not "move as freely" in experimentation as the
sciences pertaining to any other subject. The closed laboratory
evinces the desire and intention to "move freely," without criticism
or restraint.
No physician in America of Dr. Bigelow's eminence has ever stated so
distinctly the fact of torment in vivisection, and the reasons for its
condemnation:
"A man about to be burned under a railroad car begs somebody to kill
him; the Hindoo suttee has been abolished for its inhumanity; and yet
it is a statement to be taken literally that a brief death by burning
would be considered a happy release by a human being undergoing the
experience of some of the animals who slowly die in a laboratory.
Scientific vivisection has all the engrossing fascination of other
physical sciences, BUT THE TRANSCENDENT TORTURE SOMETIMES INFLICTED
HAS NO PARALLEL IN ANY OF THEM. As to its extent, we read that in
course of ten years seventeen thousand dogs were dissected alive in
one laboratory."
Why, then, does not a universal protest arise against such infamous
cruelty? On this point Dr. Bigelow is very frank. It is because of
the confidence which the general public places in the average
scientist. Is he deserving of that implicit faith? Dr. Bigelow does
not think so. He says:
"The difficulty is that the community, for want of time or opportunity
themselves to investigate the subject, ARE WILLING TO RELY UPON THE
DISCRETION OF SCIENTIFIC MEN. This is an error.... A recent
distinguished writer, a good judge of men, makes the following
observation: `Who can say why the votaries of science, though
eminently kind in their social relations, are so angular of character?
In my analysis of the scientific nature, I am constrained to associate
with it (as compared with that of men who are more Christians than
scientists) A CERTAIN HARDNESS, OR RATHER INDELICACY OF FEELING. They
strike me as being ... coolly indifferent to the warmer human
feelings.'[1]
[1] Sir Henry M. Stanley, "In Darkest Africa."
"It should not for a moment be supposed that cultivation of the
intellect leads a man to shrink from inflicting pain. Many educated
men are no more humane--are, in fact, far less so--than many
comparatively uneducated people.... The more eminent the
vivisectionist, the more indifferent he usually is to inflicting pain;
however cultivated his intellect, he is sometimes absolutely
indifferent to it....
"But in order to oppose vivisection to best advantage, and especially
lest he should place himself in a false position, the anti-
vivisectionist should bear clearly in mind that what he opposes is
PAINFUL vivisection only. For there have been wholly painless
experiments upon living animals which have led to useful results.
Some of the greatest discoveries in medical science were made with no
pain whatever.... And yet they have been often and sophistically cited
by the vivisector as plausible arguments for inflicting both excessive
and useless pain. The fact that a few able men have made discoveries
by certain painless experiments upon animals is used to justify the
demonstration of torture to medical students (to whom it is as
profitless as any medical information can be), and its practice by
them. The discovery of anaesthesia has been time and again quoted in
favour of vivisection. THIS IS SIMPLY PREPOSTEROUS. In making that
discovery, the experiments from the beginning were painless, and were
therefore wholly unobjectionable--as I happen to know, having seen the
first of them. The same is true of Jenner's vaccination, which was a
wholly painless discovery. Little pain was involved in all that was
needed to discover the circulation of the blood, which was inferred
from the valvular construction of the veins, and then easily
substantiated.... The greatest prizes in the lottery of physiological
and pathological discovery have involved little or no pain. But the
usual and staple work of a so-called `laboratory of vivisection,
physiology or pathology,' for the education and practice of medical
students in the unrestricted cutting of living animals, and for the
indiscriminate and endless repetition of experiments already tried,
where a live dog can be bought and its living nerves dissected, ... all
this is a very different affair. A distinguished vivisector once
remarked: `To us, pain is nothing.' When it is remembered that this
pain may be, and sometimes intentionally is, of the most excruciating
nature possible for human science to invent, and that in a large
majority of instances it is to little or no purpose, the remark of
this vivisector covers the objectionable ground."
In view of the foregoing quotations, it would appear almost impossible
for Dr. Bigelow's position to be misrepresented or misunderstood. He
cannot be regarded as an antivivisectionist, for he repeatedly states
that to painless experiments upon animals no objection exists. But of
the reality of the torment, and of the blunted sensibility of the
professional tormenter, he seems to have no doubt. How may reform be
promoted? By legal supervision and regulation. A few further extracts
from Dr. Bigelow's writings will bring these points into prominence:
"There can be no question that the practice of vivisection HARDENS THE
SENSIBILITY OF THE OPERATOR, and begets indifference to the infliction
of pain, as well as great carelessness in judging of its severity.
"Indeed, vivisection will always be the better for vigilant
supervision, and for whatever outside pressure can be brought to bear
against it. Such pressure will never be too great, nor will it retard
progress a hair's-breadth in the hands of that very limited class who
are likely materially to advance knowledge by its practice.
"The ground for public supervision is that vivisection, immeasurably
beyond any other pursuit, involves the infliction of torture to little
or no purpose. Motive apart, painful vivisection differs from that
usual cruelty of which the law takes absolute cognizance mainly in
being practised by an educated class, who having once become callous
to its objectionable features, find its pursuit an interesting
occupation under the name of science. In short, though vivisection,
like slavery, may embrace within its practice what is unobjectionable,
what is useful, what is humane, and even what is commendable, it may
also cover what is nothing less than hideous. I use this word in no
sensational sense, and appeal to those who are familiar with some of
the work in laboratories and out of them to endorse it as appropriate
in this connection....
"`But burning was useless, while vivisection is profitable.' Here we
reach the kernel of the argument of the pain-inflicting vivisector.
The reply is that by far the larger part of vivisection is as useless
as was an auto da fe'. It does not lead to discovery. The character
of the minds of most of those who usually practise it makes this
hardly a possibility. Real discoverers are of a different texture of
mind, which you cannot create by schools; nor can you retard their
progress by restrictions, put on all you may. But restrictions will
and should cut off THE HORDE OF DULL TORTURERS WHO FOLLOW IN THE WAKE
OF THE DISCOVERER, actuated by a dozen different motives, from a
desire for research down to the wish to gratify a teacher or to comply
with a school requisition."
How carefully and how clearly the writer has phrased his distinctions
between what in vivisection is right and wrong! In all the literature
of advocacy for free and unrestricted vivisection can we find anything
resembling it? Certainly, I know no writer favourable to unlimited
experimentation who has been equally fair. One surgical
vivisectionist is fond of dividing the class interested in discussion
of vivisection as "Friends of Research," and "Foes of Research,"
ascribing to the first all the virtues of good sense, and to the
latter all the folly that belongs to ignorance. In which class, we
may well wonder, would he place the first American surgeon of his time
because he objected only to cruelty and abuse?
To Dr. Bigelow the legal supervision of the laboratory seemed the one
practical method by which cruelty might be somewhat restrained,
because in this way he believed the public would obtain some knowledge
of the practice which is now withheld. He says:
"In order that painful vivisection may be as nearly as possible
suppressed, not only by public opinion, but by law, IT IS ESSENTIAL
THAT PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD BE FREQUENTLY INFORMED OF WHAT IT IS AND
MAY BE. Here lies the work of the antivivisectionist. Further, every
laboratory ought to be open to some supervising legal authority
competent to determine that it is conducted from roof to cellar on the
humanest principles, in default of which it should be, as slavery has
been, uncompromisingly prohibited wherever law can accomplish this
result."
Is the cruelty of unrestricted and unregulated vivisection a reality
or a myth? Of his own views on this question we can have no doubt.
He says:
"A TORTURE OF HELPLESS ANIMALS--MORE TERRIBLE BY REASON OF ITS
REFINEMENT AND THE EFFORT TO PROLONG IT THAN BURNING AT THE STAKE,
WHICH IS BRIEF--IS NOW BEING CARRIED ON IN ALL CIVILIZED NATIONS, NOT
IN THE NAME OF RELIGION, BUT OF SCIENCE."
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"The law should interfere. There can be no doubt that in this
relation there exists a case of cruelty to animals far transcending in
its refinement and in its horror anything that has been known in the
history of Nations.
"There will come a time when the world will look back to modern
vivisection in the name of Science, as they do now to burning at the
stake in the name of Religion."
Concerning vivisection, then, the views of one of the most eminent
surgeons that America has produced may be summed up as follows:
FIRST. He is not favourable to antivivisection, but to restriction.
"There is no objection to vivisection except the physical pain."
SECOND. The cruelties which pertain to certain vivisections and
vivisectors are not myth, but realities. For a description of these
cruelties, Dr. Bigelow expressly refers to the literature of protest.
THIRD. In defence of vivisection or of unrestricted experimentation,
he says that UNTRUTHFUL CLAIMS OF UTILITY have been made.
FOURTH. The reasons for inflicting prolonged torment upon animals are
wholly inadequate for its justification.
FIFTH. Vivisection has a hardening tendency upon its practitioners.
The more eminent the vivisector, the more indifferent he may become to
the infliction of torment.
SIXTH. There is ample reason for the interference of the law. Every
laboratory should be legally supervised. Public opinion should be
frequently informed concerning vivisection, its objects, and its
methods.
I have presented these opinions at length because they represent
exactly the position which I have personally maintained for over
thirty years. And if the time shall come, foreseen by him, "when the
world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of Science, as
we now do to burning at the stake in the name of Religion," then,
surely, it will be remembered that the first strong voice in America
raised, not in condemnation of all experimentation upon animals, but
solely in protest against its cruelty and secrecy, and in appeal for
its reform, was that of the leading American surgeon of his time,
Professor Henry J. Bigelow of Harvard University.