1.—“_True science finds its own by kindlier quest_.”
“Science is of the utmost importance to mankind, but the last degree of
importance cannot be said to attach to all its minute discoveries, and
where, as in physiology, the investigation becomes inhuman, there it
ought to stop. It ought to stop for our own sakes if from no other
motive, for the torturing of animals on the chance that it may suggest
the means of alleviating some of our own pains helps to blunt those
sensibilities which afford us some of our purest pleasures. Animals are
not our equals in all things, but they seem to be at any rate our equals
in the sense of pain. The want of imagination may deprive it in their
case of some of its poignancy, but on the other hand they have none of
the supports which we derive from reason and sympathy, from the
tenderness of friendship and the consolations of religion. With them it
is pure, unmitigated, unsolaced suffering. Our duties to them form a
neglected chapter in the code of ethics, but we ought not to torture
them, and there are many who will maintain that the obligation is
absolute. Life is no doubt valuable, but it is not everything. It is
more than meat, as the body is more than raiment, but it is not more
than humanity. There are occasions on which it has to be risked, and
there are terms on which men of honour and patriotism would hold it
worthless. The doctrine that we may subject the lower animals to
incredible suffering on the possibility that it may save ourselves from
an additional pang is of a selfish and degrading tendency. It helps to
lower the ‘moral ideal’ and to weaken the springs of heroism in human
character. We owe it to ourselves to keep clear of this peril. Nature
surrounds us with limitations. Here is one which all that is best and
noblest in us sets up, and it is more sacred than those over which we
have no control. We refuse to torture other sentient creatures in order
that we may live.”—Dr. Henry Dunckley (_Manchester Guardian_, August
9th, 1892).
The above noble pronouncement, with its conclusion, is instinct with the
spirit of _true_ science (which repudiates with disdain and horror the
hypocritical pseudo-science of a ghastly and demoralising study and
pursuit of cruelty),—the _true_ science which is one with love, because
it refuses the acceptance of life itself on terms of outrage to love.
See Note LXI., 3.
4.—“... _a keener lens of man’s own brain_.”
“Observation is perhaps more powerful an organon than either experiment
or empiricism.”—Richard Jefferies (“Story of My Heart,” p. 162).
_Id._... It is well that some English physicists of the fullest
scientific impulse and effort are revolted at the inhuman and bootless
cruelty of the foreign medical schools which masquerades as scientific
research. Is it not possibly something more than a coincidence that
vivisectionists in general exhibit an aversion to the equality of woman,
and that vivisection flourishes more unrestrainedly where her position
and influence are less recognised; _i.e._, in plain words,—in a lower
civilisation?
Mr. Lawson Tait says, with the indignation of a truly scientific mind at
these methods of “science falsely so called”:—
“For one, as intimately and widely concerned in the application of
human knowledge for the saving of human life and the relief of human
suffering as anyone can be, or as anyone has ever been, I say I am
grateful for the restrictive legislation. Let me give one brief
illustration of my most recent experience in this matter as one of
hundreds which confirm me in my determination persistently to oppose
the introduction into England of what passes for science in Germany.
Some few years ago I began to deal with one of the most dreadful
calamities to which humanity is subject by means of an operation which
had been scientifically proposed nearly two hundred years ago. I mean
ectopic gestation. The _rationale_ of the proposed operation was fully
explained about fifty years ago, but the whole physiology of the
normal process and the pathology of the perverted one were obscured
and misrepresented by a French physiologist’s experiments on rabbits
and dogs. Nothing was done, and at least ninety-five per cent. of the
victims of this catastrophe were allowed to die.
“I went outside the experimentalists’ conclusions, went back to the
true science of the old pathologist and of the surgeon of 1701, and
performed the operation in scores of cases with almost uniform
success. My example was immediately followed throughout the world, and
during the last five or six years hundreds if not thousands of women’s
lives have been saved, whilst for nearly forty years the simple road
to this gigantic success was closed by the folly of a vivisector....
“Views such as mine are those of a minority of my professional
brethren, and are generally sneered at as those of a crank. But my
reply to this is that they form the new belief, that of the coming
generation, and that not one in fifty of the bulk of my present
brethren have ever seriously gone into the question, and probably have
never seen a single experiment on a living animal.
“My address as the Surgical Orator of 1890, when the British Medical
Association met in this town, was mainly directed to the mischievous
system of so-called scientific training, of purely German origin and
thoroughly repugnant to our English tastes and our English
common-sense.
“It is therefore a satisfactory matter to know that the Council of
Mason’s College would have none of it, and that the governing body of
the new University College of Nottingham has recently decided
similarly. The Medical School of Queen’s College is now united
entirely with the Science School of Mason’s College; but we, of
Mason’s College, have had the direction of the science teaching of the
Medical School for several years, we have had no German scientific
methods, and our success has not diminished thereby one atom—on the
contrary.”—Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., _President of Mason’s Science
College, Birmingham_ (“The Discussion on Vivisection at the Church
Congress, October, 1892”).
At the Congress, as above, Professor Horsley made aspersions on Miss
Frances Power Cobbe, as to statements concerning Vivisection in her
work, “The Nine Circles.” The professor declared some of the reported
cruel experiments to have been painless, owing to the victims being
under the influence of anæsthetics. In reply to the attack, the
following preliminary letter from Miss Cobbe was then published:—
“TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘TIMES.’
“SIR,—Professor Horsley’s criticism on the above work—planned and
compiled by my direction—demands from me a careful reply, which I
shall endeavour to give as soon as may be possible at this distance
from the books whence the impugned passages are derived. I shall be
much surprised if the hocus pocus of the sham anæsthetic _curare_ with
ineffective applications of genuine chloroform do not once more
illustrate ‘the curse of vivisectible animals,’ and if the results of
the experiments in question, whatever were their worth, would not, in
most cases, have been vitiated had real and absolute anæsthesia been
produced in the victims. Should a small number of the experiments
cited in the ‘Nine Circles’ prove, however, to have been performed on
animals in an entirely painless state, I shall, while withdrawing them
with apologies from a forthcoming new edition of the book, take care
at the same time to call attention to the multitude of other
experiments, home and foreign, therein recorded—e.g., baking to death,
poisoning, starving, creating all manner of diseases, inoculating in
the eyes, dissecting out and irritating the exposed nerves, causing
the brain of cats ‘to run like cream,’ etc., about which no room for
doubt as to the unassuaged agony of the animal can possibly exist.”
Miss Cobbe concludes by a sharp, but just, criticism on her critic, and
with an acute diagnosis of the learned vivisectionist’s own condition:—
“The tone of Dr. Horsley’s remarks against me personally will probably
inspire those who know me and the history of my connexion with the
anti-vivisection cause with an amused sense of the difficulty wherein
the Professor must have found himself when, instead of argument in
defence of vivisection, he thus turned to ‘abuse the plaintiffs’
attorney.’ For myself I gladly accept such abuse (or mere bluster) as
evidence that the consciences even of eminent vivisectors are, like
their victims’ nerves, imperfectly under the influence of the
scientific anæsthesia, and remain still sensitive to the
heart-pricking charge which I bring against them, of cowardly cruelty
to defenceless creatures.
“I am, Sir, yours,
FRANCES POWER COBBE.
Hengwrt, Dolgelly, Oct. 8th, 1892.”
⁂ A further newspaper correspondence concerning “The Nine Circles,” a
work from which some of the foregoing notes on vivisection are copied,
has gone on while “Woman Free” is passing through the press; the
vivisectors saying that certain of the incidents transcribed in “The
Nine Circles” are without the announcement that in some cases an
anæsthetic had been administered prior to the act of living anatomy,
otherwise admittedly true in every detail. The vivisectors lay what
stress they can on the omissions; indeed, their principal advocate has
made use of a grossness of imputation and a coarseness of invective that
augurs ill for any gentleness of treatment or purpose being existent in
the organism of such an operator.
Yet, in truth, it is not a matter of surpassing import whether the
assertion of the operation (alone) being conducted under an anæsthetic
be indubitable, since the after-consequences of pain or incommodity had
to be endured by the victim without anæsthetics. What initial
chloroforming could ward off the constant after-suffering attendant on
the incubation of the disease for the creation of which the “operation”
had been performed, a period acknowledgedly often lasting for weeks, and
terminated only by death’s mercy? Or what medicament could anæsthetise
the impotent yearning—to feed her starving puppy—of a poor mother dog
whose mammary glands had been excised, even if the “operation” had been
carried out “under chloroform”? Mr. Edward Berdoe, M.R.C.S., reproduces
and reprobates the incident with horror in the _Times_ of Oct. 27,
1892:—
“Professor Goltz amputated the breast of the mother of a puppy nursing
her young ... who ‘unceasingly licked the living puppy with the same
tenderness as an uninjured dog might do.’”
Most gladly may we turn to the words and ways of worthier seekers after
truth. Professor Lawson Tait is reported by the _Standard_, 28th Oct.,
1892, as saying at a meeting the previous day:—
“Vivisection was a survival from mediæval times. It could not be
justified by any results that it had produced. In days when they could
tell the composition of the atmosphere of Orion by means of the
spectroscope, it was a disgrace that men should resort to vivisection,
instead of perfecting other and more humane means of research.”
There speaks true science. And, on a later occasion, Mr. Lawson Tait
quotes the celebrated anatomist, Sir Charles Bell (who had been falsely
claimed as an advocate of vivisection), as saying, “on page 217 of the
second volume of his great work on the Nervous System, published in
1839”:—
“... a survey of what has been attempted of late years in physiology
will prove that the opening of living animals has done more to
perpetuate error than to confirm the just views taken from the study
of anatomy and natural motions.... For my own part I cannot believe
that Providence should intend that the secrets of nature are to be
discovered by means of cruelty, and I am sure that those who are
guilty of protracted cruelties do not possess minds capable of
appreciating the laws of nature.”—(The _Times_, Nov. 8th, 1892, p. 3.)
The views of Charles Bell and Lawson Tait are in striking and
encouraging coincidence with verses LIII., LIV., and LV.
To women peculiarly it belongs to oppose the doctrines and methods of
vivisectionists, for to the practitioners of that school were due the
arguments or assumptions which sufficed to introduce for a while into
our country the vile system of according a licence to male dissoluteness
and female subjection—under a pretext of public morality and
“scientific” sanction—known on the continent as the “police des mœurs,”
and in sundry Naval and Military stations of England and Ireland as the
“Contagious Diseases Acts.”