In the Civil War if a man was shot through the bowels, he was doomed
to death; the surgeons hardly dared to open the abdomen and if they
did they didn’t know how to join the ends of the bowel so that it would
not leak. Of course the slightest leak meant infection and death. Then
came along an experimenter who etherized about thirty dogs, shot them
through the bowels, and practiced joining bowel ends until he could
make a perfect joint. It is safe to say that in the World War the
lives of thousands of men were saved as a result of that series of
experiments.
[Illustration: _These children at the Anna Durand Hospital, Chicago,
have been saved from death from diphtheria by the use of antitoxin. The
boy in the center has a squint as the result of his sickness._]
Lockjaw, tetanus, chiefly a disease of war, that threatened to
take frightful toll of soldiers wounded on the tetanus-infected
battlefields of Europe, did little damage during the late war because
of antitetanus serum made from the blood of immunized horses. Every
wounded man received an injection of this serum at the earliest
possible moment, and usually the length of time that had intervened
determined whether the man would live or whether he would die a most
distressing and horrible death.
[Illustration: _The homes of this boy and girl have to thank research
workers and animals for the lives saved by antitoxin for diphtheria.
Without antitoxin, developed by experimental work on animals, such
children would have had slim chances of recovery._]
The antityphoid vaccine, also worked out on mammals and tested on
mammals, has practically abolished typhoid fever in soldiers’ camps. It
is estimated by the Surgeon General’s office that during the World War
it saved the lives of 60,000 men in the American army alone.
[Illustration: _On the roof garden of the Home for Destitute Crippled
Children, Chicago. Suppose one of these victims of infantile paralysis
were your child? Would you hesitate to sacrifice under ether one or
more animals if through the knowledge gained the disease could have
been prevented, or your child could have recovered without being
crippled?_]