(FLOW'S PAMPHLETS x^ s \ c The Influence of Antivivisec- tion on Character W. W. KEEN, M.D. PHILADELPHIA DEFENSE OF RESEARCH PAMPHLET XXIV Issued by the Bureau on Protection of Medical Research of the Council on Health and Public Instruction of the American Medical Association "The humanity which would prevcDt human suffering is a deeper and truer humanity than the humanity which would save pain or death to animals." — Charles W. Eliot. CHICAGO American Medical Association Five Hundred and Thirty-Five Dearborn Avexle 1912 PAMPHLETS IN THIS SERIES Pamphlet I. — Vaccination and Its Relation to Animal Experi- mentation, by Dr. J. F. Schaniberg, Philadelphia. 56 pp. Illustrated. Pamphlet II. — Animal Experimentation and Tuberculosis, by Dr. E. L. Trudeau, Saranac Lake, N. Y. 16 pages. Pamphlet III. — The Role of Animal Experimentation in the Diag- nosis of Disease, by Dr. M. J. Rosenau, Washington, D. C. 8 pages. Pamphlet IV. — Animal Experimentation and Cancer, by Dr. James Ewing, New York. 12 pages. Pamphlet V. — The Ethics of Animal Experimentation, by Prof. J. R. Angell, Chicago. 8 pages. Pamphlet VI. — Animal Experimentation : The Protection It Affords to Animals Themselves and Its Value to the Live-Stock Industry, by Dr. V. A. Moore, Itbaca, N. Y. 20 pages. Pamphlet VII. — Rabies and Its Relation to Animal Experimenta- tion, by Dr. L. Frothingham, Boston. 16 pages. Pamphlet VIII. — Importance of Animal Experimentation in the Development of Knowledge of Dysentery, Cholera and Typhoid Fever, by Dr. M. W. Richardson, Boston. S pages. Pamphlet IX. — Fruits of Medical Research with Aid of Anes- thesia and Asepticism, by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, Boston. 16 pages. Pamphlet X. — Animal Experimentation in Relation to Our Knowledge of Secretions, Especially Internal Secretions, by Dr. S. J. Meltzer, New York. 32 pages. Pamphlet XL — Animal Experimentation and Protozoan Tropical Diseases, by Dr. Harry T. Marshall, Charlottesville, Va. 20 pages. Pamphlet XII. — Modern Antiseptic Surgery and the Role of Experiment in Its Discovery and Development, by Dr. W. W. Keen, Philadelphia. 20 pages. > Pamphlet XIII. — Animal Experimentation in Relation to Prac- tical Medical Knowledge of the Circulation, by Dr. Joseph Erlanger, Madison, Wis. 40 pages. Pamphlet XIV. — What Vivisection Has Done for Humanity, by Dr. W. W. Keen, Philadelphia. 16 pages. Pamphlet XV.- — The Relation of Animal Experimentation to Our Knowledge of Plague, by George W. McCoy, San Francisco. 12 pages. Pamphlet XVI. — Medical Control of Vivisection, by Dr. Walter B. Cannon, Boston. 8 pages. Pamphlet XVII. — Immunology : A Medical Science Developed Through Animal Experimentation, by Dr. Frederick P. Gay, Berke- ley. Cal. 20 pages. Pamphlet XVIII. — Obstetrics and Animal Experimentation, by 1 Dr. J. Whitridge Williams, Baltimore. 36 pages. Pamphlet XIX. — Some Characteristics of Antivivisection Litera- ture, by Dr. Walter B. Cannon, Boston. 16 pages, j Pamfhlet XX. — The Value of Animal Experimentation as Illus- ! trated by Recent Advances in the Study of Syphilis, by Dr. J. W. Churchman, Baltimore. 24 pages. Pamphlet XXI. — Animal Experimentation and Epidemic Cerebro- ; spinal Meningitis, by Dr. C. H. Dunn, Boston. 28 pages. Pamphlet XXII. — Animal Experimentation and Diphtheria,, by Dr. W. H. Park, New York. 19 pages. Pamphlet XXIII. — Animal Experimentation and Its Benefits to Mankind, by Dr. Walter B. Cannon, Boston. 24 pages. Pamphlet XXIV. — The Influence of Antivivisection on Character, by Dr. W. W. Keen, Philadelphia. 43 pages. - PRICES =^=== i Pamphlets I, XIII and XXIV: 1 Copy $ .08 5 Copies 35 10 Copies 65 23 Copies 1.25 Other pamphlets of the series. 1 Copy $ .04 5 Copies 15 10 Copies 25 25 Copies 50 All sent post-paid. Assorted if desired. Any 10 different pamphlets sent for 30 cents ; 24 for 60 cents. Stamps acceptable for amounts under fifty cents. AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION • 35 Dearborn Avenue Chicago, Illinois The Influence of Antivivisection on Character W. W. KEEJf, M.D. PHILADELPHIA l/yCVZ^ - Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Duke University Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/influenceofantivOOkeen THE INFLUENCE OF AXTIVIYISECTIOX ON CHARACTER * W. W. KEEN, M.D. PHILADELPHIA "In this controversy [vivisection] there should be no bitter- ness. . . . Do not let us attempt to browbeat or call names. . . . Vivisection tends to weaken character. . . Nothing which hurts the character can be right." — Rev. Dr. Floyd W. Tomkins, President of the American Antivivisection Society, in the Ladies' Home Journal, March, 1910. I accept the test proposed by Dr. Tomkins, and. quoted in the above motto, "Nothing which hurts the character can be right." Let us, therefore, stud}' what is the effect of antivivisection on the character of its advocates. I. VIOLENT PASSIOXS AROUSED BY AXTIVIVISECTIOX AGITATIOX The most violent and vindictive passions have been aroused and fostered, especially among women — the very flower of our modern civilization. Let us see whether they have shown "bitterness" or "called names." I have rejected much oral testimony I could use and have drawn my evidence from only a very small portion of the literature at my disposal. Herewith I reproduce (Fig. 1) the photograph of a remarkable letter which contains an asserted prayer to the Deity calling down curses by "a dozen women'' on my long-since sainted mother. It needs no comment from me save that the "horror" mentioned in this letter was excited by an article which I published in the Ladies' Home Journal for April, 1910. in which I recited a few of the benefits to humanity which had resulted from vivisection. The only clue even to the place from which the letter comes is the postmark. • * An address read before the Surgical Section of the Suffolk Dis- trict Medical Society. Boston, March 20, 1912. Reprinted by the kind permission of the editor and the publisher from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, May 2 and 9, 1912. *d d © ■H O 3- © *j & 5 i. ■P 3 cd o a 5 O CO o S is 13 •* © fH d d tj O! CQ •H © CO © o o © ■d .d S aj l— ' •H o o ~ s •d H +3 4-3 £ C £- erf H cd u A 60. -d H © O ii +3 •3 cd >> X) — Cj © d cd O o d > id © d cd e l •H •H H CO > •H ft 6 ej © ■H U> >> c: ■(-> H CO H '"'■b O ■H © 4-3 K ^ •H d b>o d "1 — 4-» © CO PJ hfl 3 M U £ •H •H d a a «M 4-> •H cd d U d © £ •H d OS o d +3 a* H h » O • © *» •H n H d d © ♦J >■ fc o 4-3 9 CO cj cy c — O •H Q © ^ A 4^> O S 4J ?4 O ■M Olj 4-3 © CO 9 o 4-3 O CO Cy •H > ■H o © § cd a a > H J4 CO "H. 13 •d © P © •H C3 CU cd d P. •H h 4-3 .d 2*0 © O O fc © CO 4-3 o o Ph ^ •> d ~ c H © © o -d 1 ^ H cd H +3 d S © 4-3 ~I G 4-3 i-j © •H fee O p 03 H rH ■d *C c o o •H •H d -d h> s £ > ■H 5 Let me quote another earlier anonymous letter I have before me. This is from Philadelphia. Instead of the usual address "Dear Sir/' it begins, "You Fiend." I had not then been promoted to "Arch-fiend" in Satan's Hierarchy. The writer exclaims, "Oh, that you all could be put through the same torture that you inflict on these helpless ones." As I am not a vivisectionist this ardent wish fails to terrify. I am an advocate of vivisection because I know how greatly it has helped me during all my professional life in saving life and lessening suffering. 1 If two letters will not convince, here is a third. This, from Baltimore, also the result of the same article, was from a writer who had the courage to sign her name and address. "You would appear even the more fiendish on account of your superior intelligence. . . . The future of a vivisectionist is a veritable hell. You, I understand, are a man advanced in years [the calendar, alas ! seems to justify this shocking statement] soon to go before the bar of justice. Can you meet your God with the terrible cries ringing in your ears of these creatures, our helpless brothers, made by his hand, that you have drawn and quartered? How they must haunt you. . . . When your time comes to die, every cry of pain and anguish that you have been the cause of producing in these helpless creatures will follow you to the depths 1. In the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for July, 1865, p. 67, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the late Dr. Morehouse and I pub- lished a paper on the "Antagonism of Atropia and Morphia.'' based on observations and experiments in the Army Hospital for Injuries and Diseases of the Nervous System. The reason which caused us to make this investigation was tbat we desired to find better means for "soothing the pain of those terrible cases of neuralgia" following gunshot-wounds of large nerves. These are accurately described in the paper as causing "anguish" and "agony" — no word could be too strong. Accordingly, in our efforts we tried a number of com- mon and Fome uncommon drugs, and finally found that morphin (the active principle of opium) was the best remedy and yet had many disadvantages. Ultimately we found that by combining with it a certain amount of atropin (the active principle of belladonna) we obtained the best results. The facts discovered in our investigations have long since become merged in the common knowledge of the profession, and standard tablets with different proportions of the two drugs are manufactured and used all over the world. Most of our patients operated on (entirely by hypodermic injections) were sorely in need of relief. A few were convalescents. In all cases we avoided telling them what drug was being used, for every one knows how imagination, fear or other emotion would alter the rate of the pulse or of the breathing. Not one man was injured in the least. Not one ever complained. Many thousands of human beings have been greatly benefited and many lives have been saved through the knowledge thus obtained. I have expressly mentioned these facts in some detail because we have been attacked in their pamphlets by the antivivksectionists for these experiments, which are described as "human vivisection." 6 of hell." Yet I have "drawn and quartered" not even so much as a mouse. But this same lady tells me that she had survived one of the most serious abdominal operations that could be clone — a hysterectomy. This operation was so perilous that until Lister had devised the antiseptic method it was never even thought possible, and its success at the present day is due chiefly to experiment on animals. The writer of the letter, therefore, is herself a witness to the benefit of vivisection. Later on she says, "If they would only use vivisectors for their experiments, it would soon be considered unnecessary." Her gentlest wish, therefore, is for human vivisection, and doubtless "without anesthetics." Per contra, in the newspapers of May 6, 1911, a dispatch states that seventeen medical students had offered them- selves for experimental inoculation with cancer, an offer which was, of course, refused, as animals can be used. A curious "statement in the letter is, "I understand the Eockefeller Institute has had four or five of its laboratories burned, the animals destroyed, rather than have them fall into the bands of these wretches, and if this thing were more widely known, every medical college in the country would be razed to the ground and the doctors tarred and feathered." The insurance companies, I am quite certain, have never heard of the one laboratory which the Eockefeller Institute possesses having been burned. But what a strange exhibition of kindness it is to gloat over the fact that the poor animals in these supposed laboratories had been roasted to death "without anesthetics." If three instances are not sufficient, here is a fourth — a signed letter from Chicago. Beferring to one case which I had published as an illustration of the value of vivisection in saving human life, she says, "My sympathy for the parents of that young man . . . would have been deep, but not so keen as for a mother dog who saw her puppy tortured to death on a dissecting table. . . . Even if you did save a man's life, was it worth while?" (Italics in the letter!) This lady wrongly assumes that the puppy was "tortured to death," i. e., without anesthetics. This, I am glad to say, is not true, as I shall show later on. To her question, "Was it worth while?" I can only say, "Ask his father and mother." And this is the ennobling influence of antivivisection ! A fifth communication is from a lady who was per- sonally acquainted with myself and my family. She sent me a pamphlet with some good advice, ending with the terse injunction. "Do God's work, not the Devil's/' and had the courage to sign her name. A sixth lady sent me (anonymously) an article from one of our magazines, with many marginal annotations and much underscoring. From this I select a few sentences. "Millions of people regard him [the vivisector] with loathing, and shudder with horror at his name. . . . Frightful as the sufferings of this tortured dog must be. I would rather be in its place than yours when your soul is summoned to its final judgment to receive judgment without mercy. [This seems to be a favorite threat of my correspondents.] May God so deal with every fiend incarnate who has thus tortured defenseless creatures All the demons and fiends do not dwell in Hades. Some are made in the image of God, but have hearts blacker and more cruel than the arch-fiend himself. These are the vivisectors who 'benefit' mankind." I have received very many more such letters — usually anonymous. These six may serve as samples. I would willingly accept the supposition of unbalanced minds as an explanation and palliation for such letters but for their number and for the fact that they so entirely coincide with almost all the "repulsive litera- ture" (to use Lord Coleridge's words) published by the various antivivisection societies. A brief search through only a part of my file of this antivivisection literature enables me to cull the following evidences of a similar debasing violence and vindictive- ness. The list could easily be extended. "The art of torture has been carried to a perfection which the devildoms of Spain in the old days of the Inquisition could not equal in ingenuity or pitilessness." '"Vivisection is the anguish, the hell of science. All the cruelty which the human or rather the inhuman heart is capable of inflicting is in this one word. Below it there is no depth. This word lies like a coiled serpent at the bottom of the abyss." "Animals are dissected alive — usually without the use of anesthetics." "The vivisector keeps his victim alive while he cuts it up." 8 "Vivisection founded on cruelty, supported by false- hood, and practiced for selfish ends." "The vivisector is less valuable to the world than the animals he destroys." "A thing I know to be damnable whatever the results." "An organized system of barbarity." "Vivisector and criminal become interchangeable terms." "Cowards who perpetrate hideous crimes." "Experiments on living animals is a system of long- protracted agonies, the very recollection of which is enough to make the soul sick as if with a whiff and an after-taste of a moral sewer." "Impious barbarity of the vivisector." "All other forms of sinful cruelty are comparatively trifling compared with the horrors of vivisection." "Deliberate dabbling in blood and agony. " "Cruelty the inevitable and odious spawn of secret vivisection." "Blood-stained hands of the grim tormentors." "Bloody mass of agony." "Devilish inventions of unbalanced mentality." At a hearing before a committee of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, I heard myself and others who were advocating the humane work of vivisection called "hyenas" by a woman. Briefer descriptive terms are as follows : scientific hells torture-house osgj of cruelty halls of agony inhuman devil devils incarnate scientific murder abominable sin devilish science fiends incarnate damnably mean arch-fiend master demon diabolical vivisection temples of torment, cruelty of cruelties infernal work hellish wrong- devil's work lust of cruelty scientific assassination torture of the innocent black art of vivisection satanie fiends human monsters demons Antivivisection writers nearly always state, assume or imply that all experiments are "tortures," i. e., that anesthetics are not used. This is wholly erroneous. In Great Britain, where all experiments are returned to the government, the following table for 1906 (the latest I happen to have) will show how utterly inde- fensible is such an assumption. It is a fair presumption that about the same average exists in the United States. Per cent. Inoculations, etc., not involving any operation 93.96 Animals killed under anesthetics 3.44 Animals allowed to recover from anesthetic but nothing likely to cause pain and no further operation allowed without anesthetic ' 2.60 1(1(1.(10 In other words, only twenty-six animals o'ut of 1,000 could by any possibility have suffered any pain, and very few of these any serious pain. Is this the torture and agony so constantly harped on? 2 Many of the instances cited in antivivisection litera- ture are taken from researches — such as Magendie's — which were made before anesthetics were discovered, over sixty-live years ago. The rest in which real cruelty was inflicted, and which if done now would be condemned by all modern research workers as freely as by the antivivisectionists themselves, were done almost wholly on the Continent, and often by persons who are now dead. In discussing vivisection to-day, these should be excluded, or their dates and countries indicated, for the public, ignorant of medical history, is misled into supposing that these persons are living and practicing these methods to-day and in America. In one of the anonymous replies to my paper on the "Misstatements of Antivivisectionists," I am represented as the apologist and advocate of experiments of which twice over at the Senate Committee hearing and again in my letter to Mr. Brown I had expressed my utter dis- approval. I am always willing to face a truthful charge, but it is a hopeless task to meet untruthful charges, especially when the author is ashamed of his own name. "Hell at Close Bange" is the title given by Miss Ellen Snow to a leaflet dealing with the work of the Bockefel- ler Institute. One would scarcely expect such a fierce heat from so frosty a name. 2. Since this address was delivered the report of the British Royal Commission on Vivisection, on which the antivivisectionists were represented, has appeared. One of their unanimous con- clusions (page 20) is as follows: "U'e desire to state that the harrowing descriptions and illustra- tions of operations inflicted on animals, which are freely circulated by post, advertisement or otherwise, are in many cases calculated to mislead the public, so far as they suggest that the animals in ques- tion were not under an anesthetic. To represent that animals sub- jected to experiments in this country are wantonly tortured would, in our opinion, be absolutely false." This clear statement should end this calumny. 10 At this institute, by experiments on twenty-five monkeys and 100 guinea-pigs, most of which animals recovered, has been discovered a serum that has brought the former death-rate of cerebrospinal meningitis of 75 or 90 per cent, down to 20 per cent, and less. Is it because of this beneficent work that it is called "Hell" ? At this institute has been discovered a means of transfusion ' of blood that has already saved scores of human lives. Is this the reason for calling it "Hell"? At this institute a method of criss-crossing arteries and veins, which almost always run alongside of each other, has been discovered by which impending gangrene has been prevented. Does this make it a "Hell" ? At this institute the cause and the cure of infantile paralysis are being sought. Are such investigations carried on in "Hell"? Miss Snow in this same leaflet expresses in italics her horror at the idea of the proposition of the institute "to build a hospital where the experiments may be con- tinued on human beings." It may be of interest to her and also to others to know that this hospital was opened in October, 1910, and that the public, undeterred by her horror, have thronged to it in such numbers that there have not been beds enough for the several hundreds of disappointed applicants. An editorial in the Journal of Zoophily 3 records a gift to this Eockefeller Institute, "an institution in New York where vivisection should be practiced with the idea of achieving as great an advance as possible in the war of science against human suffering," and adds, "but the gift only fanned into fury the opposition of the women to experiments on living animals, no matter how great the anticipated benefit." Could cruel passion be better expressed ? Can a cause which so seriously injures the character of its advocates that they indulge in this prolific vocabu- lary of vituperation by any possibility have an uplifting influence ? It eminently fulfils the proposed test — it "hurts the character and, therefore, cannot be right." Are those who give loose rein to such passion fitted to form a sound and sane judgment on the subject about which they write? This is especially true when the matter is one so technical as anatomic, physiologic, chemical, pathologic and surgical investigations as to 3. Jour. Zoophily, January, 1909, p. 2. 11 which they cannot be expected to know and, in fact, do not know anything. Even relatively few medical men are fitted by temperament and training to act as censors of such researches, much less those ignorant of medicine. I believe that much of the passion shown in the above quotations is the result of ignorance. Most of the attacks on vivisection, as I have said, assume or even state categorically that anesthetics are not used. Saving in the very rare cases in which the use of anesthetics would entirely frustrate the experiment, anesthetics are always used. This is done not only for reasons of humanity, but also because the struggles of a suffering animal would make delicate and difficult operations absolutely impossible, to say nothing of the danger of injury to the operator. The always-quoted opinion of Professor Bigelow was founded on what he had seen at the Veterinary School at Alfort, France, in the preanesthetic days. Many absolutely false statements are made that anesthetics were not used in certain specified experiments, whereas the experimenters have expressly stated that anesthetics were used. Of such misstatements by antivivisection authors I shall give some startling instances later. It •is no wonder that the public has been thus misled. "Cutting up men and women alive" is an accurate description of every surgical operation, but we all know that while in comparatively few reports of surgical operations it is expressly stated that an anesthetic was used, such use "goes without saying." One of the most frequent^ antivivisection statements is that "incomplete" or "slight" or "light" anesthesia means that the animal is fully able to feel pain and that when the eye resents a touch or there is muscular move- ment following any act which would be painful when one is not anesthetized, pain is actually being inflicted. Mr. Coleridge says (Question 10,387 in his testimony before the Second Eoyal Commission on Vivisection), "What does 'anesthetized' mean? It means 'without feeling.' You cannot be slightly without feeling. You either feel pain or you do not." Very recently when I had nitrous oxid gas given several times to a lady to bend a stiff elbow she struggled and writhed so hard as almost to throw herself out of the dentist's chair onto the floor. Yet she was never conscious of the slightest pain. In other words, while 12 the motor nervous centers responded to my forcible bending movements and caused violent muscular strug- gles, the perceptive nervous centers felt no pain. But any spectator would surely have said that she was being "tortured." This is only one of hundreds of similar cases I have had; all other surgeons have had similar experiences. In modern laboratory researches, ether or other anesthetics are almost always given. Extremely few exceptions occur, and then only with the consent of the director in each specific case. The actual conditions at the present day are well shown by the rules in force in practically all American laboratories of research. These rules have been in operation for over thirty years in one case and for more than ten years in others. In most laboratories in which students work, and where they are absolutely under the control of the director, the only animal used is the frog, and by "pithing" or decapitating it, it is made wholly insensible to pain. The idea that students privately "torture" animals, often, it is stated, out of mere curiosity, is absolutely false. I have been intimately associated with students ever since 1860, first as a student and since 1866 as a teacher. I state, therefore, what I am in a position to know. Moreover, private experimental research takes time which our overworked students do not have, and money which they cannot afford. It means the rent of a laboratory, the purchase of very expensive and delicate instruments, the rent of an animal room, the cost of the animals, and of their food and care, a man to look after them — for all modern surgical work on animals must be done with the same strict antiseptic care as on man or the experiment will surely fail and discredit the author — a total expense amounting to a very large sum. I quote in full the rules which, as I have said, are in force in practically all American laboratories of research: RULES REGARDING ANIMALS 1. Vagrant dogs and cats brought to this laboratory and purchased here shall be held at least as long as at the city pound, and shall be returned to their owners if claimed and identified. 2. Animals in the laboratory shall receive every considera- tion for their bodily comfort ; they shall be kindly treated, properly fed, and their surroundings kept in the best possible sanitary condition. 13 3. Xo operations on animals shall be made except with the sanction of the director of the laboratory, who -holds himself responsible for the importance of the problems studied and for the propriety of the procedures used in the solution of these problems. 4. In any operation likely to cause greater discomfort than that attending anesthetization, the animal shall first be ren- dered incapable of perceiving pain and shall be maintained in that condition until the operation is ended. Exceptions to this rule will be made by the director alone, and then only when anesthesia would defeat the object of the experiment. In such cases an anesthetic shall be used so far as possible and may be discontinued only so long as is abso- lutely essential for the necessary observations. 5. At the conclusion of the experiment the animal shall be killed painlessly. Exceptions to this rule will be made only when continuance of the animal's life is necessary to deter- mine the result of the experiment. In that case, the same aseptic precautions shall be observed during the operation, and so far as possible the same care shall be taken to minimize discomforts during the convalescence as in a hospital for human beings. [Signed] Director of the Laboratory. I may add that at the Rockefeller Institute regular trained nurses are employed and are on duty not only during the day, but at night when necessary. Self-confessed total ignorance of a subject on which one gives extensive evidence is not often known, but Dr. Herbert Snow of London, an authority among the antivivisectionists, is a case in point. Dr. Snow's evi- dence before the Royal Commission on Vivisection (1906) covers ten pages quarto and he answers 326 questions. In 1911 Dr. Snow visited America. In a letter to the Philadelphia hedged he makes the almost incredible statement that he gave all this evidence "in utter ignorance of the vivisection question." Moreover, when asked by the Commission (Question 2242), "Do you find any fault with the present gentle- men who are licensed under the act"? he replied, "I do not," and again (Questions 222? and 2228) he admits that both painful and painless experiments may some- times be necessary. In other eases ignorance of physiology and anatomy is shown which would only excite a smile did it not 4. Philadelphia Ledger, March 6, 1911. 14 gravely mislead the reader. I shall give only a single illustration here. Others will be found elsewhere in this paper. "The Nine Circles," with its sulphurous subtitle, "Hell of the Innocent," is an English book originally issued by the late Miss Frances Power Cobbe, in 1892. This edition had to be withdrawn on account of its false statements, especially as to the non-use of ether. 5 A second and revised edition was issued in 1893. This was "carefully revised and enlarged by a subcommittee especially appointed for the purpose," as the preface states. On page 15 of the revised edition, it is correctly stated that Prof. Henry P. Bowditch of the Harvard Medical School, in some experiments on the circulation, etherized a cat and that "then its sciatic nerve was divided, etc." The sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the body of man and animals and passes down the back of the leg. After division of the nerve the portion going down the leg below the place where the nerve was divided was stimulated by an electrical current. As this part of the nerve was wholly cut off from the spinal cord and brain, by no possibility could any pain be felt. Yet a Boston lawyer, in a leaflet published by the New England Antivivisection Society, comments on a similar experiment as follows : "It will be readily seen even by the casual reader that it involves an amount of agony beyond which science is unable to go." Just how the "casual reader" would be so well informed as to physi- ology when a lawyer and two doctors — not casual but intelligent and careful readers — got things totally wrong, is not stated. Dr. Bowditch published a correc- tion of this misstatement in 1896. In spite of this, the New England Antivivisection Society in 1909, thirteen years after this public correction, was still distributing this lawyer's statement. But in "The Nine Circles" (second edition, carefully revised by Dr. Berdoe and the committee) these experi- ments are referred to as "experiments on the spinal cord"! (Italics mine.) Yet Bowditch did no operation on the spinal cord. Miss Cobbe, not being an anatomist, might be pardoned for confusing the thigh and the spine of the cat, but surely Dr. Berdoe ought to have seen to 5. See pp. 26, 27 and 28 of this reprint. 6. Bowditch, Henry P. : Advancement of Medicine by Research, p. 43. 15 it that "sciatic nerve" and "spinal cord" were not used as interchangeable terms. Many years ago, after amputating a leg near the hip, I tried to see how long electric stimulation of the sciatic nerve would cause the muscles of the amputated leg to contract. After four hours, during all of which time the muscles continued to react, I had to stop as I could give no more time to the experiment. According to the canons of antivivisection as voiced above, I should have continued to etherize the patient whose leg had been amputated, for he, just as much as Bowclitch's cat, could feel "agony beyond which science is unable to go." Let me give only two other surprising statements. Dr. Hadwen 7 criticizes my reference in Harper's Maga- zine 8 to "an astringent named 'adrenalin.' ' ; I had shown how valuable adrenalin had been in saving human life in certain surgical conditions, and also described the resuscitation, . by means of adrenalin and salt solution, of a dog which had been "dead" for fifteen minutes. Dr. Hadwen concludes his paragraph thus : "But it does seem a pity that these New World vivisectors will not be able to perform the resurrection miracle without first killing somebody to get at his kidneys." The presum- able object of "getting at his kidneys" would be in order to make adrenalin from them. Now adrenalin is not made from the kidneys at all, least of all from human kidneys, but from the adrenal glands of animals. In the same article he vaunts the use of salt solution instead of the direct transfusion of blood, and rightk" says that he has "seen the most marvelous effects folio > the injection of an ordinary saline solution into the venous system in cases of loss of blood." But he seems to be ignorant of the fact that this very saline transfusion was begun and perfected by experiments on animals. I commend to him Schwarz's essay (Halle, 1881) with its- twenty-four experiments on rabbits and dogs, and Eberius' essay (Halle, 1883) with its ten experiments on rabbits and the record of eleven cases in which Schwarz's method had already been used in man. These essays were practically the beginning of our knowledge of the advantages of the use of salt solution over the old dangerous methods of transfusion of blood. The antivivisectionists deny the truths of bacteriology. Yet we practical physicians, surgeons and obstetricians 7. Hadwen : Jour. Zoophily, January, 1910. 8. Keen, W. W. : Harper's Magazine, April, 1909. 16 Icnow by daily experience that Pasteur's and Lister's researches are the basis of most of our modern progress. Are Hadwen, Harrigan, Snow and their colleagues right and have all medical colleges all over the world in estab- lishing chairs of bacteriology and all medical men in believing bacteriologic diagnosis of such importance and in basing on the germ theory their antiseptic treatment which has so revolutionized modern surgery been wholly wrong? The germ theory is as well established as the doctrine of the circulation of the blood. 9 II. FOSTERING A SPIRIT OF CRUELTY TO HUMAN BEINGS My second reason for believing that antivivisection injures character is that, by putting a greater value on the well-being and the lives of monkeys, guinea-pigs, rabbits, dogs, cats, mice and frogs than on the lives of human beings, it fosters a spirit of cruelty to human beings. Is it not a cruel passion which will lead men and women to write such letters and to print such epithets as I have quoted? Is it a right thing to misstate the facts of operations, and after the falsity of the charge has been proved, still continue for years to hold up men with human feelings and sensitive to abuse before the community as vile monsters of cruelty? Nay, more than this, is it not an extraordinary thing that those who so vehemently denounce human vivisection are even "mong its advocates? 9. In Mrs. White's answer to this address (Boston Med. and Surg. Jour., July 25, 1912, p. 143), as the editor on page 131 points out, her reference to the "fever inseparable from the healing of abdominal wounds" shows ignorance of the results of modern progress in sur- gery. Thanks to bacteriology and the antiseptic method of Lister and his followers, thousands of surgeons and patients the world over can confirm my own experience, both as a surgeon and as a patient, that no fever usually follows a clean abdominal operation. Before Lister's day, not only was there the terrible fever and suf- fering of peritonitis, but the mortality was so great that we never dared to do many operations which are now commonplace and rarely fatal. Another illustration of ignorance of surgery is found in Mrs. White's reference (p. 143; in the same paragraph to the "pain caused by the presence of gall-stones in the gall-bladder," a pain which she says "is generally considered the most violent pain known." Now. it is true that sometimes "gall-stones in the gall- bladder" do cause some or even considerable pain ; but many post- mortem examinations reveal "gall-stones in the gall-bladder" which have never given the patient the slightest pain, and the patient, therefore, was totally ignorant of their presence. The "violent pain" to which she refers is due not to their presence in the gall- bladder, but to the terrible "gall-stone colic" caused by the passage of the gall-stones out of the gall-bladder into its duct, or tube, opening into the bowel. Modern antiseptic surgery prevents these constantly recurring attacks by safely removing the gall-stones from the gall-bladder or from the gall-duct. 17 When I was professor of surgery in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania I took as the topic of 'my address at one of the commencements, "Our Eecent Debts to Vivisection." Mrs. Caroline Earle White pub- lished "An Answer to Dr. Keen's Address Entitled, "Our Eecent Debts to Vivisection/' At the bottom of page 4 I find the following: "I take issue with Dr. Keen in the second place where he says, 'These experi- ments cannot, nay, must not, be tested first upon man.' I assert, on the contrary, that in the majority of cases they must be tested first upon man [italics my own] or not tested at all, because no important deductions can ever be drawn with any degree of certainty from experi- ments upon animals, since in some, inexplicable way their construction is so different from that of man." The statements in the latter portion of the concluding sentence will much amuse anatomists, physiologists and biologists, or, in fact, any one who reallv knows anything about science. With minor modifications, man and the lower animals are alike in almost all particulars, both in structure and function, in health and disease. The extraordinary fact is that Mrs. White asserts that experiments must be tested first on men or not tested at all. That is to say, we must either experiment on human beings or else continue in exactly the same old rut as before and never make any progress, for every departure from prior practice, however slight, is an "experiment." If this basic doctrine of antivivisection had held good for the last fifty years "Lister would not have been able, after carefully testing his antiseptic method on animals and having found it successful, then, and not before then, to try it on man. 10 By this means he became, as the British Medical Journal has just called him, "the maker of modern surgery." On page 10 of Mrs. White's "Answer" is found the following flat-footed advocacy of human vivisection: "Dr. Keen mentions that in India alone 20,000 human beings die annually from snake-bites and as yet no antidote has been discovered. How can we search intelligently for an antidote, he says, until we know accurately the effects of the poison? I should reply that in order to find out the effects of the poison and to 10. Keen, W. W. : Modern Antiseptic Surgery and the Role of Experiment in Its Discovery and Development, Jour. Am. Med. Assn., April 2. lSlO, p. 1104. Reprinted in this series of pamphlets on Defense of Research. See Xo. XII, page 2 of the cover. 18 search also for an antidote, the best plan would be for the experimenters to go to India where they could find as large a field for investigation as they require in the poor victims themselves. Here is an opportunity such as is not often offered for experimenting upon human beings, 11 since as they would invariably die from the snake-bites, there can be no objection to trying upon them every variety of antidote that can be discovered. Nothing seems to me less defensible than these experiments on the poison of snake bites upon animals since it is the one case in which they could be observed with so much satisfaction and certainty upon man!" (Italics my own.) Such a proposal is as absurd as it is cruel. Even if the experimenter could afford sufficient time and money to go to India for months or rather for years, how could he arrange to be present when such unexpected accidents occurred? How could he have at hand in the jungle the ether, chemicals, assistants, tables, tents, food and drink, and the necessary yet intricate and delicate instruments? And even if he had all of these, how could he work with the calmness and the orderly deliberation of the laboratory when a fellow human being's life was ebbing away and every minute counted in such a swift poison? The proposal is cruel and revolting and would never be accepted by any investigator. But Mrs. White is not the only one who is guilty of making such a proposal. Many antivivisection leaflets and pamphlets express the wish that the vivisectors should be vivisected. In a pamphlet 12 freely distributed in the United States I find the following in a letter from a man at that time a Senator of the United States : "It would be much better to dissect men alive occasion- ally for the general welfare because the attendant phenomena and demonstration of the victims being of our own particular form of animal would be far more 11. In her answer to this address (Boston Med. and Surg - . Jour., July 25, 1912, p. 143), Mrs. White, after ample time for reflection, defends her proposal for "experimenting- on human beings," saying that "it does not seem to me that this is a cruel suggestion, as my only object in it was to benefit the poor natives who die by the thousand every year." Such a defense places her clearly and defi- niteJy among the advocates of vivisection, whose "only object" is to prevent death "by thousands every year." This object, more- over, has already been obtained in a score of diseases and will be obtained hereafter in many others, not, however, by "experimenting on human beings," as she advocates, but on dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, mice, frogs, etc. 12. Cobbe, Frances Power, and Bryan, Benjamin : Vivisection in America, p. 15. 19 valuable than the result of our observation upon the physical structure illustrated in the agonies unto death of the helpless creatures around us." The English is as distressing as the proposal is astounding. Let me give one more illustration of the effect of anti- vivisection in encouraging cruelty. To-day the plague, cholera and yellow fever no longer terrify Europe or America. What is the reason for this ? Primarily and chiefly the discovery of the germs of cholera and of the plague by bacteriologic methods, which in turn are very largely the result of experiment on animals, and of the means of the transmission of yellow fever, though as yet not of its cause. In the latter case experiments on animals were out of the question because it is impossible to transmit yellow fever to animals. They are not susceptible to the poison. So a number of noble medical men and others volunteered to have experiments tried on them. The very first experiments were tried on medical men. These men slept in a stifling atmosphere for twenty nights in the beds in which yellow fever patients had died, and in their very clothes, clothes soiled with their black vomit, urine and feces ; tried to inoculate themselves by putting some of the black vomit into their eyes, or by hypodermic injections, etc., but all in vain. By none of these methods were they able to inoculate themselves with the fever. One step more was requisite — to learn whether a well man bitten by an infected niosquito, but having been exposed to no other possible source of infection, would contract the disease. Dr. Carroll of the Army was the first to offer himself, and nearly lost his life. Others followed. Several lost their lives, among them Dr. Lazear, at the beginning of a most promising career. His tablet in the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in the fine words written by President Eliot records that "with more than the courage and the devotion of the soldier, he risked and lost his life to show how a fearful pesti- lence is communicated and how its ravages may be prevented." Contrast with this a cruel letter 13 written by a woman : "Science is based on such firm foundation, indeed, that it can at a moment's notice be tumbled down and become a wrecked mass by a mosquito ! Xot only this, but these life-long vivisectors could not even prolong 13. New York Herald, Aug. 2, 1909. 20 their own lives. Undone by a mosquito ! I shall always have unbounded admiration- for that clever insect." (Italics mine.) This self-sacrifice for humanity has made us masters the world over of yellow fever, has made possible the Panama Canal, has saved many thousands of human lives and millions of dollars in our own Southern states alone, and yet a woman can feel "unbounded admiration for the clever insect" which slew these heroes and had devastated cities and countries for centuries ! Does not such antivivisection zeal "hurt character"? Two men are especially obnoxious to the antivivisec- tionist : Pasteur, whose demonstration of the cause of that form of infection known as puerperal or childbed fever alone would have made his name immortal; and Lister, whose application and extension of the principles laid down by Pasteur have revolutionized all modern surgery. I need not argue the case for Pasteur, Lister and modern antiseptic surgery. Excepting the antivivisec- tionists, every intelligent man and woman the world over knoivs that modern surgery has been made safe by their researches. Let me give a single instance. In the charming "Life of Pasteur" by Rene Vallery- Radot, it is stated 14 that, hoping to overcome the almost invariably fatal results of ovariotomy in the hospitals, the authorities of Paris "hired an isolated house in the Avenue de Meudon, a salubrious spot near Paris. In 1863 ten women in succession were sent to that house. The neighbors watched those ten patients entering the house, and a short time afterward their ten coffins being taken away !" When I was the assistant to the late Dr. Washington L. Atlee in the late 60's, two patients out of three on whom he, the foremost ovariotomist in America, operated died. To-da3 r , thanks to Pasteur and Lister and modern surgery, based on experiment on animals more than on any other foundation, not more than two or three in a hundred die after ovariotomy. Yet, if the antivivisec- tionists had prevailed, tbe horrible mortality of the earlier days and even the tragedy of the ten women and the ten coffins would still exist. Is not this cruelty? Let me take another illustration of a similar cruelty, a form especially interesting to women. Prof. J. 14. Vallery-Radot : Life of Pasteur, ii, 16. 21 Whitridge Williams, 15 professor of obstetrics in the Johns Hopkins University, states the following facts: In 1866 Lefort showed" that in 888,312 obstetric cases in the hospitals of France up to 1864, 30,394 women had died of puerperal fever; that is to say, 3.5 per cent., or about every twenty-seventh mother. From 1860 to 1864 the mortality in the Maternite of Paris had risen nearly fourfold, to 12.4 per cent. In December, 1864, it rose to 57 per cent. ; that is to say, more than, one-half of the women who bore children in that hospital in that month died of childbed fever ! In Prussia alone, in the sixty years from 1815 to 1875, Boehr showed that 363,624 women had died of the same fever and estimated that every thirtieth prospective mother was doomed to death from that cause. In the United States, Hodge, of Philadelphia, showed that in the Pennsylvania Hos- pital from 1803 to 1833 there had been a mortality of 5.6 per cent. ; i. e., every eighteenth mother was doomed. Lusk reported an epidemic in 1872 with 18 per cent.; that is, almost every fifth mother perished from the same fever ! As late as March, 1879, only thirty-three years ago, at the Paris Academy of Medicine, when the leading men in a debate on childbed fever were at a loss to account for it, Pasteur drew on the blackboard what we now know as the streptococcus and declared this little vegetable organism to be its cause. Our own Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1843 was the first who declared on clinical grounds that the doctors and the nurses carried .the contamination, but how and why he could not know, for bacteriology did not then exist. • He was followed by Semmelweis, of Vienna, who in 1861 still further reinforced the reasoning of Holmes, and for his pains was tabooed by his professional colleagues and ended his life in a madhouse. The result of Pasteur's researches and the practical application of Lister's antiseptic method to obstetrics as well as to surgery have borne the most astounding and gratifying fruit. For instance, in 1909 Markoe reported in the New York Lying-in Hospital in 60,000 births a maternal mortality of only 0.34 per cent., and Pinard in 1909 in 45,633 births recorded a mortality of only 0.15 per cent., while in 1907 Mermann had been able 15. Williams, J. Whitridge : Obstetrics and Animal Experimenta- tion, Jour. Am. Med. Assn., April 22, 1911, p. 1159, and this series of pamphlets No. XVIII. 22 to report a mortality of only 0.08 per cent, in 8,700 patients ! In other words, these reports show in round numbers that, taking in the two extremes, the deaths from childbed fever fell from the extraordinary rate of fifty-seven in a hundred mothers, or the former usual rate of five or six in every hundred mothers, to one mother in 1,250. If for fifty years past the antivivisectionists had had their way, all these marvelous results in obstetrics would have been prevented and women would still be dying by the hundred and the thousand from puerperal fever — an entirely preventable disease. Would it not have been the height of cruelty to stop these experiments? But according to the Journal of Zodphity such wonder- ful life-saving exjDeriments should be prohibited, "no matter how great the anticipates benefit." In surgery, erysipelas, blood-poisoning, lockjaw, hos- pital gangrene, etc., would still be killing our patients right and left; weeks of suffering, to say nothing of danger, would confront every patient operated on; the modern surgery of the ' head, of every organ in the abdomen and pelvis, of tumors and of cancer, amputa- tions and many other operations, instead of being almost painless and so safe as they are to-day, would be the cause of prolonged illness, pain and death ; in fact, most of them would be deemed entirely impossible of perform- ance — they were impossible before Pasteur and Lister — and animals themselves would still be suffering as of old from animal maladies whose causes are now known and whose ravages have been enormously, diminished. Call you not the desire to arrest such experiments cruelty to man and animals alike? In a speech in the House of Commons, April i, 1883, Sir Lyon Play fair, the Deputy Speaker, said : For myself, though formerly a professor of chemistry in the greatest medical school of this country [Edinburgh], I am responsible only for the death of two rabbits by poison, and I ask the attention of the House to the case as a strong justifi- cation for experiments on animals; and yet I should have been treated as a criminal under the present act [the British vivi- section law] had it then existed. Sir James Simpson, who introduced chloroform, . . . was then alive and in constant quest of new anesthetics. He came to my laboratory one day to see if I had any new sub- stances likely to suit his purpose. I showed him a liquid 23 which had just been discovered by one of ray assistants, and Sir James, who was bold to rashness in experimenting on him- self, desired immediately to inhale it in my private room. I refused to give him any of the liquid unless it was first tried on rabbits. Two rabbits were accordingly made to inhale it; they quickly passed into anesthesia and apparently as quickly recovered, but from an after-action of the jioison they both died a few hours afterward. Now was this not a justifiable experi- ment on animals? Was not the sacrifice of two rabbits worth saving the life of the most distinguished physician of his time ? As this experiment was not for the good of the two rabbits, but in fact, killed them, in the eye of present- day antivivisectionists it would be wrong, and, if they had their way, illegal and punishable, and Simpson would have lost his life. Would not this be cruelty? Let me state briefly two of the most recent discoveries in medicine and surgery : 1. Vaccination against typhoid fever. Starting from Pasteur's researches on animal diseases and continued by various observers and especially in the last few years by Sir Almroth Wright, of London, there has been developed chiefly by experiments on animals a "vaccine" to prevent typhoid fever. When by such experiments the method was found to be sufficiently safe, it was tried on man.' In the Boer War, and among the German troops in their African colonies, tentative trials of its value were made. Now it has been tried in the United States Army on a larger scale and with more astonishingly good results than in any previous trials. During the Spanish War there were 20,738 cases of typhoid and 1,580 deaths; nearly one-fifth of the entire army had the disease. It caused over 86 per cent, of the entire mortality of that war ! In some regiments as many as 400 men out of 1,300 fell ill with it. How this would handicap an army in the field — to say nothing of deaths — is evident. Lately in our army on the Mexican border, for months under war conditions, except as to actual hostilities, there has not oeen a single soldier ill with typhoid: This is due partly to better sanitation (which in turn is due largely to bacteriology) but chiefly by reason of wholesale antityphoid vaccination. This is evident from the fact that during the year June 30, 1908, to 1909, when this vaccination was purely voluntary and the army was not in the field, proportionately sixteen times as many unvaccinated soldiers fell ill with the disease as compared with the vaccinated. On the Mexican border there has been only one single case of typhoid, not in a soldier, but a teamster who had not been vaccinated. So evident are the benefits of this preventive inoculation that Dr. Neff, the director of health of Philadelphia, has issued a circular proposing its municipal use, and also to prevent typhoid in our summer resorts. In many large hospitals it is extensively used to protect the physicians and nurses from catching the fever. Would it not have been cruel to prevent such life- saving experiments? 2. In surgery let me instance the surgery of the chest. This has been the region in which progress has lagged far behind that of all the other parts of the body till within the last five or six years. The reason was that the moment you opened the chest cavity to get at the heart, the lungs, the esophagus, the aorta or the pleura, it was like making an opening in the side of a bellows. The air, instead of being drawn in and forced out through the nozzle (corresponding to the mouth in the case of a patient), passed in and out through the opening in the side of the bellows or the chest. If only one side was opened, breathing was embarrassed, if both sides were opened the patient's lungs collapsed, breathing was impossible and death ensued. Sauerbruch, then of Breslau, first devised a large air- tight box or chamber in which the pressure of the air could be increased or diminished at will. The body of the patient, the surgeons, nurses and instruments were all inside the box, and a telephone enabled them to give directions to those outside, especially to the etherizer. The head of the patient with an air-tight collar around his neck protruded outside of the chamber where the etherizer also was placed. In such a chamber the chest could be safely opened. But while this was an immense improvement, such a chamber is clumsy, not easily transportable, and is very expensive. The method has done good service, however. It has been improved by others and is in use to-day by many surgeons. At the Bockefeller Institute, Meltzer and Auer, by a number of experiments on animals, have lately developed a new, simple and safe method of anesthesia with ether which is revolutionizing the surgery of the chest and to a considerable extent may even displace the ordinary 25 inhalation method of anesthesia. As soon as the patient has been etherized in the ordinary way, a rubber tube is inserted into the windpipe through the mouth. By a foot bellows ether-laden air is pumped into the lungs through this tube, the foul breath escaping between the tube and the windpipe and out through the mouth. Experiments on animals showed that the rubber tube used for so long a time would not injure the vocal chords and so alter or destroy the voice of a patient, or cause injury to the lungs, and that the method was most efficacious in the surgery of the chest. I saw Carrel thus keep a dog under ether for about an hour and a half; open both sides of the chest by one wide sweep of the knife, displace the heart and lungs this way or that; expose and divide the aorta between two clamps (to prevent immediate fatal hemorrhage) ; do a tedious and difficult operation on the aorta; unite its two cut ends; replace the heart and lungs, and close the wound. An hour later the dog, which showed no evidences of suffering, was breathing naturally, and in time recovered entirely.* What this method means in injuries and diseases of the heart, in gangrene, abscess and tumors of the lungs, in cancer of the esophagus, and foreign bodies lodged in the esophagus or in the bronchial tubes, and in diseases of the aorta, one can hardly yet even imagine. These experiments have done more for the surgery of the chest in three or four years than all the "clinical observation" of cases in a thousand years. The method has already been tried successfully in several hundreds of cases in man, and the future has in store for us a new and most beneficent chapter in the surgery of the chest. Yet if the antivivisectionists had prevailed all these experiments would have been prevented, the doors of the Eockefeller Institute nailed up, and men, women and children have been deprived of the benefits of these splendid discoveries. Call you not that intensely cruel ? Moreover, these very same people in their own house- holds and without the slightest pity will kill rats and mice by turning them over to the tender mercies of cats, by drowning them, by strangling them in traps, by poisoning them with strychnin or phosphorus, or by * For these and other experimental researches Carrel has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine — a splendid testimony to his genius — from the first scientists of the world. 26 any other means of "torture"; but they hold up their hands in holy horror when any proposal is made to terminate the lives of other rats and mice almost always without pain and with immense benefit to humanity. They are cruel and callous to human suffering so long as dogs and cats, mice and guinea-pigs escape ! And yet, as I have shown, only twenty-six animals in a thousand can possibly ever suffer at all ! That sentiment rather than principle is at the bottom of the antivivisection crusade is shown by what I in common with many others believe to be true, that if experimental research could be carried on in other animals without using clogs and cats there would scarcely have been any antivivisection movement. III. DIMINISHING OF REVERENCE FOR ACCURACY The third way in which the influence of antivivisection injures character is by diminishing the reverence for accuracy. In 1901 1 gave many instances 16 of the misstate- ments of the antivivisectionists. These misstatements were contained in two anonymous pamphlets, and I have two more similar publications which are also anonymous. 1 have before me also three publications purporting to be replies to that publication of mine, all again anonymous. Is a foe who attacks from ambush worthy of the respect and confidence of the public ? These misstatements, so far as I know, are still dis- tributed in leaflets and pamphlets without correction nearly eleven years after their incorrectness was shown. In fact, several of them reappear uncorrected in the Journal of Zoophily for Julv, 1911. Let me give a few new instances. The most prominent antivivisectiOnist in England is Mr. Stephen Coleridge. On page 183 (April to July, 190?) in the minutes of his evidence before the Eoyal Commission on Vivisection, I find the following: Question 10952: We may have inspection, but still we may ask a person of character when he saw the experiment what, his opinion of it was. Will you not accept that ? Answer: Certainly not, because I think that all these experi- menters have the greatest contempt for the act of Parliament. They would deny a breach of this act just as I should deny a breach of the motor car act. I drive a motor car and 16. Keen, W. W. : Misstatements on Antivivisection, Jour. Am. Med. Assn., Feb. 23, 1901, p. 500. when I go beyond the speed limit and the policeman asks me I say, % Xo, I am not going beyond the speed limit, 11 [italics mine]. Nothing would keep me from going beyond the speed limit except the presence of a policeman in the car; and nothing will keep the experimenter within the four corners of the act except an inspector in the laboratory. Question 10953: Surely, if you were asked about the speed limit and gave your word that you had not exceeded it, you would not expect to be disbelieved ? Answer : No, I did not say so. I said last year that of course I did, and I exceed it every time. Question 10954: You (ire apparently not very ethical about motor cars [italics mine]. If you apply your principles as regards motoring to the physiologists, you have very little to say against them ? Answer : What I have to say is that they regard the vivisec- tion act of 1876 with the same contempt that I regard the motor car act as regards the speed limit. In quoting also a letter from the Home Office Mr. Coleridge admits mutilating it, for in reply to Question 11015, he says, "I seem to have left out the important item of it."' See also Questions 10301, 11011, 11021 and 19967 to 19973. Comment on Mr. Coleridge's testimony is superfluous. Again in the "Black Art of Vivisection," Mr. Cole- ridge states, "The Pasteur institutes in Paris and else- where have entirely failed to prevent people dying of hydrophobia." Yet the fact is that formerly from 12 to 14 per cent, of persons bitten developed the disease and every one of them died, whereas the result of the Pasteur treatment in 55,000. cases has diminished the mortality to 0.77 per cent, of those bitten. I cite another English instance. In "The Xine Cir- cles," 18 is published a reply to a letter by Sir Victor (then Mr.) Horsley, published in the London Times, Oct. 25, 1892, a copy of which T have before me. The book, as the London Times points out in an editorial, was 17. In a letter referring to this address (Boston Med. and Surg. Jour., July 11, 1912. p. 71), Mr. Coleridge says that I seem "quite shocked that he should admit that he constantly breaks the law and exceeds the speed limit of 20 miles an hour in his motor car." and that "a quarter of a million motorists" do the same. If the reader will again peruse Mr. Coleridge*s testimony, as quoted in the text, he will find that there are two admissions: (1) that he con- stantly breaks the law. i. e.. the "statute law" of England as to the speed limit; and (2) that when he goes beyond the speed limit, and the policeman asks him he says, "No, I am not going beyond the speed limit." The last statement is what gives special point to the quotation from his evidence, but in his letter he omits any reference to this more important admission. 18. Second Edition, pp. 23-28. 28 Compiled under his [Dr. Berdoe's] direction. He was entrusted with the task of reading the proofs and was sup- posed to safeguard the accuracy of "the compiler." He now admits that he overlooked in Miss Cobbe's preface a passage in which she "was careful to say, ... so far as it has been possible, the use or absence of anesthetics has been noticed in regard to all the experiments cited in this book." Mr. Horsley in the appendix to his letter, which we publish this morning, shows by reference to some twenty cases cited in "The Nine Circles" how entirely inconsistent with the truth this guaran- tee is, and Dr. Berdoe's reluctant acknowledgment completes the proof. A still more remarkable letter appears in the same number of the Times from Prof. C. S. Sherrington of Liverpool. He sa}"s : I find in the book, "The Nine Circles," three instances in which I am by name and deed held up to public abhorrence. From each of the three statements made about me the employ- ment of anesthesia in my experiments is studiously omitted, although expressly mentioned in each of the published papers on which these statements are professed to rest. In two out of three statements I am accredited with inflicting on living animals, and without the employment of anesthetics, a dissec- tion and procedure that I pursued only on animals which icere dead. Accordingly the society withdrew the book from the market, but later published a revised second edition. In his reply to Professor Horsley's letter calling atten- tion to the misstatements in the first edition, the excuses that Dr. Berdoe gives in this second edition are very extraordinary. Among them, for example, one is "the sentence about testing the sight after recovery from the anesthetic was overlooked. Another excuse is "this was taken at second hand from another report where the ' question of pain was not under discussion." In a third he says, "We have not always access to 'original papers' and can only rely on such reports and extracts as are given in the medical and other journals." I ask whether it is fair, square dealing to base grave charges of cruelty on sentences "overlooked" and on "second-hand" misinformation ? But Miss Cobbe was by no means satisfied with mis- representing English medical men. In the pamphlet "Vivisection in America," I find on page 9 a letter by a 29 Boston lawyer in which he says of American experiments, "In other words, animals are dissected alive usually without the use of anesthetics, for the supposed (but illusory) gain to science." (Italics mine.) I have already given a table showing that only twenty-six ani- mals out of a thousand could by any possibility have suffered any pain, and that even these were anesthetized. Is it correct, then, to say that animals are "dissected alive usually without anesthetics"? Near the top of page 45 Miss Cobbe's pamphlet reads as follows : Dr. Ott, in the Journal of Physiology, Vol. II, p. 42, describes a number of experiments on a number of cats not etherized [italics my own], for the purpose of making observations on the physiology of the spinal cord. I find that on reading the original paper there were four series of experiments: In the first series, there were twenty experiments. In the first experiment the animal was killed before the experiment began. In. eleven other instances it is expressly stated in each experiment that the animals were etherized. Dr. Ott informs me that the other eight were so etherized and that he invariably etherizes the animals. In the second series there were eight experiments. On page 52 of the Journal of Physiology it is stated that the animals were etherized. The third series consisted of ten experiments, and on page 54 it is expressly stated that the animals were etherized. The fourth series consisted of ten experiments and again on page 60 it is stated that the animals were etherized. We see, therefore, that Miss Cobbe's state- ment "not etherized'- is untrue, for of forty-eight ani- mals, one was killed ; in thirty-nine it is expressly stated that they were etherized ; leaving only eight out of forty as to the etherization of which nothing is said, though it was done. On pages 45 to 48 I find a series of experiments on the surgery of the pancreas by the late Dr. Senn of Chicago. This was in July, 1886, at a time when the surgery of the pancreas was just beginning. Two pages and a half of Miss Cobbe's pamphlet are devoted to describing in detail experiments which, as no mention is 30 made in her pamphlet of ether, one would certainly suppose were done without ether and would certainly be very painful. On looking at page 142 of the original paper I find that it is expressly stated that the animals were etherized. In a series of experiments by Halsted, under experi- ment jSTo. 6, p. 51, Miss Cobbe's pamphlet says, "Died under the operation, which was carried on for two hours on a young, small brindle dog," which would imply two hours of "agony." The original expressly states the fact that this dog died from the effects of the ether. So much for Miss Cobbe's idea of reproducing accu- rate accounts of the experiments to which she refers. An amusing instance of misrepresentation is seen in an antivivisection comment made on one of Carrel's experiments on a cat. "How intense the suffering must have been to cause a cat (an animal usually so quiet and reposeful) to spend the day jumping on and off the furniture !" As a matter of fact, the kitten was only "playing with a ball of paper." Another illustration of the way in which sentences are detached from their context and made to mean quite different things and repeatedly published years after the falsity of the statement has been demonstrated is shown by the constant inclusion of Sir Frederick Treves among the opponents of vivisection. He stated of one single investigation that operations on the intestines of dogs in his opinion — other surgeons do not hold the same opinion — were useless as a means of fitting the surgeon for operations on the human bowel. Ever since this utterance 19 Sir Frederick Treves has been con- stantly quoted in the manner mentioned, yet in a letter to the London Times of April 18, 1902, he says: The fallacy of vivisection can hardly be said to be estab- lished by the failure of a series of operations dealing with one small branch of practical surgery. Xo one is more keenly aware than I am of the great benefits conferred on suffering humanity by certain researches carried out by means of vivisection. This was noticed editorially in the British Medical Journal of April 26, 1902. So late as 1909. in the May number of the Journal of Zobphily, the editor-in-chief, Mrs. Caroline Earle White, reprints from the North American of April 12, 1909, her signed letter, and implies that Sir Frederick Treves is an opponent of 19. Treves, Sir Frederick : Lancet, London, Nov. 5, 1908. 31 vivisection, seven years after this correction had appeared. In the number of the same journal for July, 1909, the associate editor of the journal prints a letter of denial from Sir Frederick Treves, and yet so late as the number for March, 1911, p. 177, the same old quota- tion from Sir Frederick Treves is published in the same journal which twenty-two months before had printed his own letter of denial. 20 ' 21 At the annual meeting of the Eesearch Defense Society Sir Frederick Treves, in referring to the great progress made in the science of medicine, said : "This progress has in the main been accomplished by experiments on animals." Ought not his name hereafter to be omitted from the list of the opponents of vivisection ? A postal card issued by the American Antivivisection Society in Philadelphia (there are several others of the same sort) presents a picture of a large dog with his mouth gagged wide open and his paws tied "without anesthetic." The object of the gag, of course, is to pre- vent the animal from biting before and while it is being etherized. It is absurd to state that this produces any pain, but a guide at the traveling antivivisection exhi- bition explained to two of my friends that it was used to break the jaivs of the dogs! and that this was done "without ariesthetics." But in nearly all our surgical operations within the mouth, on the tonsils, cleft palate, the tongue, etc., we employ gags of various kinds to keep the mouth wide open. To show how little annoy- ance this causes, here is a picture (Fig. 2) of a little girl, 4 years old, my own granddaughter, with a mouth- gag which I have used many times over with children and adults in operations about the mouth. This' particu- lar photograph, it will be observed, was taken also "with- out an anesthetic." It was not necessary to tie her hands and feet as is done with dogs, for the child regarded the whole proceeding of photographing her with her mouth wide open as a "lark," and sat as still as a mouse. Is it necessary to add that her jaw was not broken ? Miss Britton, in her $300 antivivisection prize essay 22 vividly describes an operation (removal of the breasts 20. Just as I had corrected the proof of this paper, April 29, 1912. I received throug'h the mail from Mrs. Caroline Earle White a reprint of her letter of April 12, 1909, with the same misleading quota- tion, thirty-three months after Sir Frederick Treves' letter of denial had been printed in her own journal. 21. Treves. Sir Frederick : Brit. Med. Jour.. July 8, 1911, p. 82. 22. Our Dumb Animals, January, 1910. 3.2 of a nursing mother dog) which was never done at all. This fictitious operation is described in "The Nine Circles;" 23 again it appears in Dr. Albert Leffingwell's essay, "Is Science Advanced bv Deceit," published in 1800. In 1901 Professor Bowditch called Dr. Leffing- well's attention to the fact that no such operation was Fig. 2. — Mouth-gag as used in operations about the mouth. ever done. In Dr. Leffingweirs collected essays entitled "The Vivisection Question," on page 109 of the second revised edition (1907), there is, in a footnote, a correc- tion admitting that no such operation was ever clone, but on page G7 of the same edition, a description of this same operation still appears uncorrected, six years 23. Second Edition, p. 28. 33 • after Bowditch's letter had been received and the mis- statement acknowledged. In the Antivivisection Exhibit which was shown in ]STew York, in the winter of 1909-1910, Professor Lee states that there was "an oven heated by gas burners which contains the stuffed body of a rabbit and which the attendant tells you is used for the purpose of baking live animals to death, and this also is performed without anesthetics." Then to add still further pathos, the note at the end of the label on the oven said "gagging, muffling or severing of vocal organs prevents tortured animals giving voice aloud piteously to such terrible suffering." As a matter of fact, "the oven is an appa- ratus intended for the incineration of the . . . refuse of a laboratory!" I might add that it is a constant practice in medicine and surgery now to use various forms of apparatus for the purpose of "baking" an arm, leg or other part of the body, and lately a patient of mine has had her arm "baked" almost daily for weeks at a temperature up to 300° F. with great benefit. In the exhibit of the American Antivivisection Society in Philadelphia in Xovember, 1911, a portrait of a dog was shown with a large placard stating correctly that the dog had been stolen from its owner and sold to the University of Pennsylvania for experiment. It omitted to state the further fact, which is perfectly well known, that the dog was kept for identification under Eule 1 (page 12), was claimed, identified and turned over to its owner and not used for experiment. Such a placard stating half the truth but not the whole truth inevitably leads the public to draw a false conclusion. The bodies of three dogs were also exhibited, each labeled "The Vivisected Product of 'a Philadelphia Laboratory." All show gaping wounds; one, in fact, has the entire abdomen and pelvis wide open. Such a condition is utterly incompatible with any research. Surgeons and physiologists when experimenting on animals are necessarily as scrupulously careful in their antiseptic technic as in operations on human beings. Wounds are accurately closed and carefully dressed. Any experimenter leaving wounds wide open and undressed as are those in these dogs would invite failure in every case, and when he published his results and had to confess to- a high and needless mortality, he would discredit himself. • 34 One of these dogs shows an absurd operation in the neck. The great blood-vessels from the right and left sides of the neck have been drawn together in front of the windpipe and then tied — a procedure that is unimaginable to any surgeon. Moreover, from the wide- open abdomen and pelvis the following organs have been removed : the stomach, all the large and small intestine, except a portion a few inches long, the spleen, the pancreas, both the kidneys and the bladder. The liver, however, is left. Cannot even any non-medical person of ordinary intelligence see that if all these organs were really removed and, in addition, the great blood-vessels of the neck on both sides were really tied, thus cutting off almost all of. the blood-supply to the brain, and then the neck and the abdomen were left wide open, the death of the animal on the table would be inevitable? About a dozen medical men, all teachers in medical schools, after careful inspection of these dogs, unite in believing that all or nearly all of these mutilations must have been done post mortem and not during life. More- over, there is no evidence that these animals were really "vivisected," that is, operated on during life. Still further, granting that all these operations were done for research and during life, if the animals were etherized no pain would have been felt and no cruelty perpetrated. The significant omission to say anything as to any anesthetic, like the omission as to the restora- tion to its owner of the stolen dog, entirely misleads the public. Dr. Henry P. Bowditch 24 quotes an extraordinary statement of the late Henry Bergh, an ardent antivivi- sectionist. Mr. Bergh says : Robert MacDonald, M.D., on being questioned, declared that he had opened the veins of a dying person, remember, and had injected the blood of an animal into them many times and had met with brilliant success. In other words, this potenate has discovered the means of thwarting the decree of Providence when a person was dying, and snatching away from its Maker a soul which He had called away from earth. I have happily been able to rescue quite a number of dying persons who but for my ' timely aid would have been dead persons. Instead of supposing that I had "thwarted the decrees of Providence and snatched a soul from its Maker," I have always been under the 24. Bowditch, Henry P. : Animal Experimentation, p. 72. 35 impression: (1) that it was not in my feeble power to thwart the decrees of the Almighty, and (2) the very fact that I was able to save a dying person from death was the best evidence that the decree of Providence was that the patient at that time should live and not die. But it seems that in the catechism of antivivisection it is an impious crime to save the life of a dying person, though I suppose it is proper to save the life of a patient who is only "sick." In the Journal of Zoopliily for April, 1910, p. 44, under the caption "Still More Barbarity," is an editorial signed "C. E. W.," the initials of the editor-in-chief. In this editorial it is stated as to certain experiments of Dr. Wentworth of Boston that they were "upon between forty and fifty little children in the Children's Hospital of that city, every one of whom died after the performance of his operation." The "casual reader" would certainly understand that every one. of these forty to fifty children died as a result of the operation. Let us see what the real facts are. 25 In 1895, in a case of possible tuberculous meningitis, Dr. Wentworth did lumbar puncture in order to make a positive diag- nosis. Lumbar puncture consists in introducing a rather long hypodermic needle between the vertebras in the small of the back (lumbar region) and withdrawing some of the fluid from around the spinal cord. This fluid circulates freely to and fro both within the brain and its membranes and within the membranes of the spinal cord. The needle is inserted below the end of the spinal cord, rarely with general anesthesia, some- times with local anesthesia of the skin, but generally without even this, as the pain is slight and only momentary. . In 1895 this method of diagnosis was comparatively new. Its value was uncertain, its dangers, if any, were not determined. The appearance of the fluid and the nature of its microscopic contents in human beings were imperfectly known. Dr. Wentworth in this case used the method for diagnosis. Alarming symptoms appeared, but passed away. The child was proved not to have meningitis and "left the hospital shortly afterward per- fectly well." In order to determine whether this case was excep- tional, and the dangers only accidental, or always to be feared (which if true might compel- the entire abandon- 25. Boston Med. and Surg. Joui\, Aug. 6 and 13, 1896. 3G ment of lumbar puncture), he repeated the operation most cautiously at first and finally with surer faith in its safety and value in twenty-nine other cases. In fifteen of the thirty cases the puncture was expressly clone in order to make a diagnosis — - meningitis or other diseases of the brain and spinal cord being suspected. In the other fifteen cases, while there probably was no cerebral or spinal disease, it was of great importance to know whether examination of the cerebrospinal fluid might throw any unexpected side-light on these diseases, and if not, it would at least disclose Avhat the normal con- dition, appearance and microscopic contents of the fluid were. Forty-five punctures in all were made on the thirty children. In three cases the puncture was made after death. Of the twenty-seven living children, fourteen died. Not one of the fourteen died from the operation, but, as the post-mortems showed, from meningitis, tuberculosis, pneumonia, water on the brain, convulsions, etc., as is expressly stated in each case in the paper. But the editorial says "between forty and fifty little children . . . every one of whom died after the performance of the operation. I have before me several antivivisection pamphlets published in Xew York, Phila- delphia and Washington in which Wentworth's cases are narrated as cases of "human vivisection," and it is usually stated that "many of them died," but the reader would still suppose that it was as a result of the opera- tion. In two of these pamphlets, "brief abstracts" of five cases are given, usually only one to three lines long. The post-mortem reports published in Wentworth's paper showed that these five patients died from menin- gitis (two cases), infantile wasting, tuberculosis and defective development of the brain and convulsions. Yet the "casual reader" would inevitably suppose that they died from the lumbar puncture as no other cause of death is stated in these pamphlets. When Dr. Cannon pointed out the inaccuracy of the editorial of April, 1910, in the Journal of Zobpliilij, that same journal in the issue for July, 1911, p. 219, in a paper signed "M. F. L." (the initials of its associate editor) not only did not acknowledge the error, but practically repeated it by saying that Dr. Cannon is "severe on the Journal of Zobphihj for having referred last year to Dr. Wentwortlrs forty-five experiments on 37 children and for having mentioned the fact that the children died after the operation." (Italics mine.) Is it fair dealing to give such very brief abstracts and omit the most important facts as is done here? In 1901 I pointed out 16 these misstatements and what the truth was, but the same pamphlets have been constantly dis- tributed without any correction. In November, 1910, nearly ten years after I had exposed the matter, Dr. Cannon states that one of these pamphlets was sent to a friend of his with a letter from the president of the New York Antivivisection Society, saying, "You may rely on them as being absolutely accurate and authentic !" Still worse: In April, 1910, "C. E. W." enlarges the number from thirty to "between forty and fifty" and actually says that "every one" of them died, and "M. F. L." practically repeats the misstatement by saying that "the children died after the operation." 20 -Suppose thirty friends dined together at the Bellevue- Stratford, then took a train and as a result of a collision fourteen were killed.; would a reporter, and still less an editor, be justified in stating in print "between forty and fifty friends dined last night at the Bellevue-Strat- ford. Every one of them died shortly after partaking of the dinner" entirely omitting the collision as the real cause of death ? Now after fifteen years, what has been the result of these investigations by Dr. Wentworth and others? Lumbar puncture is a thoroughly well-established means of diagnosis. That it is attended with practically no danger is shown by the fact that it is now a routine practice in certain diseases, even much more important than recording the pulse and the temperature. Holmes 27 states that he has done the operation "over four hundred times and has never met with an accident." It is not only always done in some diseases, but is repeated two, three or more times in the same patient in cases of cerebrospinal meningitis. As I showed in my paper in the Ladies' Home Journal (April, 1910) the 26. In Mrs. White's reply to this address (p. 144) she "pleads guilty" to the charge of misstating, as to these children, "that they all died," and says she "unconsciously exaggerated." On page 143 she states that she is "most particular to avoid not only false- hood, but even exaggeration." It is hardly correct to say that the statement that there were "between forty and fifty children" and that "they all died" is an "exaggeration" of the real fact, namely, that there were only twenty-seven living children operated on, and of the fourteen who died not one of them died from the operation, but from well-known causes revealed by the post-mortem examina- tions and fully stated, in each case, in Dr. Wentworth's paper. 27. Holmes! Arch. Tediat., October, 1908, p. 738. 38 son of then governor, now Mr. Justice Hughes, of the United States Supreme Court, a student at Brown Uni- versity /stricken with a violent attack of the epidemic form of the disease, had lumbar puncture done three times; the first time in order to make a diagnosis and also for the injection of Flexner's serum, the second and third times for two other injections of the serum, which snatched him from otherwise practically certain death. In this disease, Eoyer 28 says : "It is absolutely neces- sary to do a lumbar puncture" to make a diagnosis, and Dunn 29 says emphatically, "Without lumbar puncture a diagnosis of cerebrospinal meningitis is absolutely with- out value for scientific, statistical or therapeutic pur- poses." As there are half a dozen different forms of meningitis, and the remedy for the deadly epidemic form is of no use in the other forms, lumbar puncture, the only absolutely positive means of- differentiating them, cannot be dispensed with. Moreover, its use has been broadened, as shown in the case of young Mr. Hughes. No longer are we content to use it merely as a means of diagnosis, but it is the only means of successful treatment of that terribly fatal malady. It is also used for diagnosis in several surgical diseases and injuries. Moreover, the method of spinal anesthesia, which is most useful in cases in which other methods of anesthesia are too dangerous, is exclusively by means of lumbar puncture, the cocain or other local anesthetic being injected around the spinal cord by the hypodermic syringe. 30 When a witness is called, it is not allowable for the party calling him to accept a part of his testimony and refuse to accept the rest, yet this is precisely what the opponents of research do. They always eite, for example, the late Professor Bigelow, printing his earlier utter- ances based on the suffering he saw at Alfort in the preanesthetic days, but they carefully omit the following later expression of opinion: 31 28. Royer : Arch. Pediat., October, 1908, p. 729. 29. Dunn, Charles Hunter : Am. Jour. Dis. Child., February, 1911, p. 95. 30. Those who wish to consult by far the best statement for gen- eral use of the steps by which epidemic meningitis has been con- ' quered and the results of the new but now thoroughly well-estab- lished serum treatment by lumbar puncture can obtain a cony of Dunn's paper on this subject (No. 21 of this series) by enclosing 4 cents (or 50 cents for twenty-five copies) to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Chicago. 31. Bigelow, Henry J. : Anesthesia : Addresses and Other Papers, Boston, 1900, p. 371. 39 The dissection of an animal in a state of insensibility is no more to be criticized than is the abrupt killing of it, to which no one objects. The confounding of a painful vivisection and an experiment which does not cause pain — either because the animal is under ether, or because the experiment itself is pain- less,' like those pertaining to the action of most drugs, or because it is a trivial one and gives little suffering — has done great damage to the cause of humanity, and has placed the opponent of vivisection at a great disadvantage. ... A painless experiment on an animal is unobjectionable. So, too, when the statements of Horsley, Ott, Crile and others that the animals were anesthetized and suf- fered no pain are shown to antiviviseetionists, they reply, "We do not believe it, for the only testimony to this insensibility to pain is that of the vivisectors themselves." They greedily accept as true all their other statements as to the operations they did, etc., down to the minutest details, but they refuse to accept those as to anesthesia. !No court of law would sanction such a course. In reviewing the preceding misstatements and those quoted in my former paper 10 I have been compelled to conclude that it is not safe to accept any statement which appears in antivivisection literature as true, or any quotation or translation as correct, until I have compared them with the originals and verified their accuracy for myself. Xot seldom this is impossible, as no reference to the volume, month, day or sometimes even the year of publication is given. Lest the reader think this too severe a statement I will refer to only one instance in the anonymous pamphlet, '"Human Vivisection," in addition to others already shown to be grossly inaccurate. On page 9 in the account of Sanarelli's five experi- ments in the endeavor to inoculate yellow fever, the phrase "'the final collapse" appears as an alleged transla- tion of the original Italian. The word * final" does not occur in the original Moreover, the collapse was not "final," for every one of the five patients recovered, yet the pamphlet says that "some if not all of them, died." The phrases "scientific murder" and "scientific assassin- ation" are also freely used. Even the cover and the title-page of this pamphlet have as a motto, "Is scientific murder a pardonable crime?" As not a single patient died, were they really "murdered" or "assassinated" ? 40 CONCLUSIONS In thirty years the sixteen [British] antivivisection societies have received more than £100,000 ($500,000) according to Mr. Stephen Coleridge's testimony before the Boyal Commission on Vivisection (Questions 10256 to 10260). The American societies have had many bequests given to them, and in the aggregate must have also spent a large sum of money. On the other side, the friends of research and progress have had little money, have had to stop research and waste a deal of precious time in defending their benefi- cent researches from the attacks of the antivivisection- ists; the rest of the time they have quietly gone about their business, adding to the sum of our knowledge and forging new and more efficient weapons against disease and death. What, then, is the net result? What have the friends of research accomplished, and what achievements can the foes of research show? Let me put it in a con- trasted tabular form and confine it to what has occurred during my own professional life. THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE FRIENDS OF RESEARCH 1. They have discovered and developed the antiseptic method and so have made possible all the wonderful results of modern surgery. 2. They have made possible practically all modern abdominal surgery, including operations on the stomach, intestines, appendix, liver, gall-stones, pancreas, spleen, kidneys; etc. 3. They have made possible all the modern surgery of the brain. •4. They have recently made possible a new surgery of the chest, including the surgery of the heart, lungs, aorta, esophagus, etc. 5. They have almost entirely abolished lockjaw after operations and even after accidents. 6. They have reduced the death-rate after compound fractures from two out of three, i. e., sixty-six in a hundred, to less than one in a hundred. 7. Thev have reduced the death-rate of ovariotomy from two out of three, or sixty-six in a hundred, to two or three out of a hundred. 8. They have made the death-rate after operations like hernia, amputation of the breast and of most tumors a negligible factor. ■ 41 9. They have abolished yellow fever — a wonderful triumph. 32 10. They have enormously diminished the ravages of the deadly malaria, and its abolition is only a matter of time. 11. They have reduced the death-rate of hydrophobia from 12 or 11 per cent, of persons bitten to 0.77 per cent. 12. They have devised a method- of direct transfusion of blood which has already saved very many lives. 13. They have cut down the death-rate in diphtheria all over the civilized world. In nineteen European and American cities it has fallen from 79.9 deaths per hundred thousand of population in 1891, when the anti- toxin treatment was begun, to nineteen deaths per hun- dred thousand in 1905 — less than one-quarter of its death-rate before the introduction of the antitoxin. 11. They have reduced the mortality of cerebrospinal meningitis from 75 or even 90 odd per cent, to 20 per cent, and less. 15. They have made operating for goiter almost per- fectly safe. 1G. They have assisted in cutting down the death- . rate of tuberculosis by from 30 to 50 per cent, for Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus is the cornerstone of all our modern sanitary achievements. 17. In the British Army and Navy they have abolished Malta fever, which in 1905, before their researches, attacked nearly 1,300 soldiers and sailors. In 1907 there were in the army only eleven cases; in 1908, five cases; in 1909, one case. 18. They have almost abolished childbed fever, the chief former peril of maternity, and have reduced its mortality from five or ten up even to fifty-seven in every hundred mothers to one in 1,250 mothers. 19. They have very recently discovered a remedy which bids fair to protect innocent wives and unborn children, besides many others in the community at large, from the horrible curse of syphilis. 20. They have discovered a vaccine against typhoid fever, which among soldiers in camps has totally abolished 32. Mrs. White in her letter (p. 144) argues that this statement is incorrect because, forsooth, yellow fever "is still flourishing in a number of places in South America, Central America and Mexico." Of course it is, but all the world knows that if they adopted the methods of Colonel Gorgas in the Canal Zone, yellow fever would soon be banished from these other places. Since May 17, 1906 (now [October, 1912] almost six and a half years ago), Dot a single case of yellow fever has originated on the isthmus ! 42 typhoid fever, as President Taft has so recently and so convincingly stated. . The improved sanitation which has helped to do this is itself largely the result of bac- teriologic experimentation. 21. They are gradually nearing the discovery of the cause, and then we hope of the cure, of those dreadful scourges of humanity, cancer, infantile paralysis and other children's diseases. Who that loves his fellow creatures would dare to stay the hands of the men who may lift the curse of infantile paralysis, scarlet fever and measles from our children and of cancer from the whole race? If there be such cruel creatures, enemies of our children and of humanity, let them stand up and be counted. 22. As Sir Frederick Treves has stated, it has been by experiments on animals that our knowledge of the pathology, methods of transmission and the means of treatment of the fatal "sleeping-sickness" of Africa has been obtained and is being increased. 23. They have enormously benefited animals by dis- covering the causes and in many cases the means of preventing tuberculosis, rinderpest, anthrax, glanders, hog cholera, chicken cholera, lumpy jaw and other dis- eases of animals, some of which also attack man. If the suffering dumb creatures could but speak, they too would pray that this good work should still continue unhindered. THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE FOES OF RESEARCH Not a single human life has been saved by their efforts. Not a single beneficent discovery, has been made by them. Not a single disease has been abated or abolished by them. All that they have done is to resist progress — to spend .$500,000 in thirty years in Great Britain alone, and very large amounts of money in the United States ■ — and to conduct a campaign of abuse and gross mis- representation. They apparently care little or nothing for the con- tinued suffering and death of human beings, the grief and not seldom the ensuing poverty of their families, provided that twenty-six out of every thousand dogs and cats, monkeys and guinea-pigs, mice and frogs experimented on shall escape some physical suffering. They insist, therefore, that all experimental research on animals shall stop and — astounding cruelty — that 43 thousands of human beings shall continue year after year to suffer and to die. The Age of Experiment is the Age of Progress. This is true in mechanics, in engineering, in electricity, in every department of human knowledge in which experi- mental investigation is possible. Medicine is no exception. Stop experiment and you stop progress. But while stopping progress in other departments only means' that we shall have no further development in the external comforts and conveniences of life, the arrest of the experimental method in medicine means that progress in the knowledge of the cause and cure of disease shall stop and that our present sufferings and sorrowful bereavements from the onslaught of can- cer, scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough and all the other foes of health and life — especially of our dear children — must continue. In the last fifty years we have made more progress than in the preceding fifty centuries. I believe that if experimental research is continued and aided, the next fifty years will be still more prolific of benefit to man- kind than even the past fifty. I have absolute confidence in the humanitj r , the intelli- gence and the common sense of this nation that they will see to it that this progress shall not be halted by the outcries and misstatements of the antivivisectionists. Dr. S. Weil" Mitchell, when visiting the Antivivisec- tion Exhibition in Philadelphia, put the matter in a nutshell Avhen he said to one of the guides, "Your exhibition is not quite complete. You should place here a dead baby and there a dead guinea-pig with the motto, "Choose between them.'*? 3 33. Of course, not all antivivisectionists are to be grouped with those who are responsible for the letters, the epithets and the per- sistent misstatements mentioned in this paper. I have, for example, some most esteemed personal friends who are more or less opposed to research by means of experiments on animals. But I believe that most of the reasonable persons who take this stand are not well informed, either as to the character of such researches, to their profound importance to the human race and to animals, or to their wonderfully beneficent results. They are misled by the mis- statements of the chief antivivisectionists, and their kindly hearts are so shocked by the asserted "torture" of dogs, cats, etc., that they lose sight of the real and horrible torture inflicted on human beings by diseases which the advocates of research are endeavoring to banish. Had they ever stood as in the past I have stood, knife in hand, by the bedside of a gasping livid child struggling for breath, ready to do a tracheotomy when the surely tightening grip of diphtheria made it necessary to interfere, they would hail with delight the blessed antitoxin which has abolished the knife and enormously diminished tbe mortality of that curse of childhood. They would surely bless God that such a discovery as this antitoxin could be made solely by experiments on animals. The sufferings of a few such animals is as nothing compared with the lessening of suffer- ing and saving of life for multitudes of human beings (to say nothing of the saving of sorrow and suffering to their families and friends), not only now, but for all time to come. PAMPHLETS ON Medical Fakes and Fakers Consumption Cure Fakes The ten different preparations discussed in this pam- phlet were originally dealt with in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The matter has been somewhat elaborated, several illustrations added and the whole reprinted and attractively bound in stiff paper cover. The various fakes dealt with are : Aicsol (Lloyd) * Nature's Creation * J. Lawrence Hill, M.D.* Hoff's Cure Sartolin International Institute * [*This matter also appears in indi Lung Germine * Yonkermann's "Tuberculo- zyne" * Wilson's Cure Oxidaze — Oleozone — Jlijdro- cine * idual pamphlet form, price 4 cents] Cancer Fakes The United States government has, within the last two or three years, investigated a number of concerns exploiting so-called cures for cancer. In practically every case these companies have been declared fraud- ulent and the use of the United States mails denied them. This pamphlet contains the exposes of the fol- lowing concerns : Rupert Wells » Dr. and Mrs. Chamlee d Co.* Q. M. Curry * B. F. Bye } Drs. Mixer * W. O. Bye \ * T oxo- Absorbent Company * L. T. Leach] [*This matter also appears in individual pamphlet form, price 4 cents] Medical Institutes Some of the cruelest frauds perpetrated by quacks are those carried on under the name of Medical Institutes. This pamphlet deals with three frauds of this kind — Wisconsin Medical Institute Epileptic Institute Boston and Bellevue Institute Convictions Under the Food and Drugs Act The convictions that the government has obtained against the adulterators of drugs and similar prep- arations are described technically in official documents known as "Notices of Judgment." One hundred and forty-eight of these cases are here abstracted in popu- lar form. (continued on back cover) Prices of these four pamphlets assorted as desired : One copy, 6 cents ; five copies, 25 cents ; ten copies, 40 cents ; twenty-five copies, 75 cents. Stamps acceptable for amounts under fifty cents. ****.mr* i,a. HISTORICAL COLLECTION Medical Fakes and Fakers - (Continued) Viavi A concern sells nostrums for "female trouble." Alcola A fake cure for drunkenness. Sanatogen Cottage cheese as an elixir of life. Tuberclecide A fraudulent "consumption cure." Dr. Branaman A "cure for deafness" fraud in Kansas City, Mo: Murine Eye Remedy The modern Colonel Sellers. Mrs. Cora B. Miller A mail-order medical fraud in Kokomo, Ind. Carnegie University A fraudulent "school*' that sells diplomas for $50. Fake Gall-Stone Cures "Fruitola" and "Mayr's Stomach Remedy." Carson's Temple of Health A Kansas City fakery. Stuart's Plas-Tr-Pads and J. B. L. Cascade Two fraudulently exploited mechanical devices. Woods' Cure for Drunkenness An international fake fraudulently sold. The Bertha C. Day Company A mail-order medical concern of Fort Wayne, Ind. The Interstate Remedy Company A mail-order fake with a "free recipe" bait. The Oxydonor and Similar Fakes The gas-pipe therapy frauds. Press Agents and Preservatives How the borax trust tries to mold public opinion. Van Bysterveld Medicine Company A fraudulent Grand Rapids, Mich., concern. American College of Mechano-Therapy A correspondence school of "curative mechanics." Marforie Hamilton's Obesity Cure A widely advertised fat-reduction humbug. Prices of these nineteen pamphlets, assorted as de- sired : One copy, 4 cents ; five copies, 15 cents ; ten copies. 25 cents ; twenty-five copies, 50 cents. All post- paid. Stamps acceptable for amounts under 50 cents. DUKE MED. CENTER LIB. HISTORICAL COLLECTION