Animal Rights History »» Dr. James Macaulay

"Why I Oppose Vivisection, No. II," Animals' Friend

WHY I OPPOSE VIVISECTION.
No. II.—By JAMES MACAULAY, M.D., F.R.C.S.E.

DURING the meeting of the British Medical Association, at Norwich, in August, 1874, a French physiologist, M. E. Magnan, performed some operations which were highly applauded by the advocates of vivisection. The professed object was to show the effects of alcohol upon animals. Some dogs were tied down to a table at the Masonic Hall ; and then, through tubes inserted into their opened thighs, absinthe was injected. The operator was assisted by four medical men of Norwich, whose names I refrain from giving, as they are probably now ashamed of the part they took in the wretched exhibition. There were many spectators, most of them young practitioners, but also some men of eminence in the profession, curious no doubt to witness the proceedings of the French operator, an adept in vivisection as practised in the Continental Schools.

The whole scene was one of low and stupid barbarity. The general effects of alcohol on the system are known, and any points yet undetermined can be ascertained by observation far more surely than by experimenting under unnatural conditions. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals very properly took up the case. M. Magnan was out of their reach. He had gone back to Paris, where he got great praise, and an award of 2,500 francs, for his share of experiments by which he had sought to educate English physiologists ! Proceedings were taken against the Norwich practitioners who assisted at the operations. The Norwich magistrates agreed in the opinion that the experiments were cruel and useless, but eventually dismissed the case, on the plea that the offences did not seem to come within the meaning of the Act under which the prosecution was laid.

It must not be supposed that all those who were present regarded the exhibition with approval. For instance, Mr. Tuffnell, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Dublin, appeared at the beginning of the experiments, but left the place in disgust, with strong protest against the atrocities that were going on. As he went out he unlocked the door of a room where a number of poor animals were waiting to be dragged to the hall of torture, and set them at liberty. Sir William Fergusson, the eminent surgeon, of King's College Hospital, was also there for a time, and afterwards described "the ghastly scene," the "groaning of the dogs," their "writhing agony," and in one of them "epileptic convulsions," adding an emphatic condemnation of the whole exhibition as a revolting scene of wanton cruelty. The opinion of the medical profession throughout the kingdom was that the experiments on this occasion were not demanded in the interests of science.

But this was more than twenty years ago. We have travelled far on the downward road since that. The result of the Norwich trial was that, in fear of further prosecutions, physiologists sought protection by obtaining an Act of Parliament, after a Royal Commission had printed its report. Of the story of the huge "Blue Book" of those days, with the comments and controversies arising out of it, we have no intention of here speaking. It was a miserable affair on the whole ; the facts and arguments of the opponents of vivisection being inadequately represented, and a large number of witnesses in its favour pressed into the record. Sir William Gull was asked if he could name therapeutic remedies which have been discovered by vivisection. He replied in a jaunty way, "The cases bristle around us everywhere !" And what were his statements ? These : That our knowledge of dropsical affections, of pulmonary apoplexy, and a multitude of other things, were "due to Harvey's discovery of the circulation," ! and that the discovery of vaccination was due to experiments on living animals. The majority of the Commission took in this nonsense, not knowing that Dr. Jenner's discovery was made by observation of the people in the dairy district in Gloucestershire, and that his great experiments were not upon animals but upon children and human subjects.

Another Professor, Dr. McKendrick, handed in a list of twenty-two discoveries

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which he said were due to vivisection. Every one of these alleged discoveries is known to be due not to experiments, but to clinical and anatomical and physiological research. This is demonstrated in the "Essay on Vivisection," published at Edinburgh, copies of which, reprinted by the American Anti-Vivisection Society, can be obtained of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals, 20, Victoria Street, Westminster. A small volume by Benjamin Bryan can also be purchased there, containing copious evidences of the futility and cruelty of operating on living animals. These books are referred to as giving ample details on the whole subject. The Norwich case, and the consequent appointment of the Royal Commission, and passing of the Vivisection Act, are here mentioned as showing the origin of the experimental laboratories, now so common, and every year multiplying in our Schools of Medicine. But there have always been men of eminence in the profession who have pronounced the asserted claims of vivisection to be baseless. And there are many physicians and surgeons now who maintain an honourable protest against experiments, which are cruel and unjustifiable, which are degrading to the profession, baneful to the students who practise or witness them, and opposed to true science, as well as to justice and humanity.

Vivisection is a new name for a very old thing. In the medical schools of Alexandria, to which students resorted from all parts of the world, there were some physiologists who had laboratories for performing experiments. The subjects upon which they operated, whether for research or for demonstration, were not "lower animals," as we call them, but human living subjects—malefactors who had been condemned to death. One vivisector is recorded to have operated upon many hundreds of criminals. Here was vivisection under the most favourable conditions for obtaining facts, whether for science or for practice. But these ancient vivisectors learned very little by these experiments. The Roman physician, Celsus, who lived in the reign of Augustus, and whose book "De Medicinâ," is still a classical work, very strongly condemned these researches. He says, "Of the things sought by these cruel operations some are altogether beyond the reach of human knowledge, and others could be obtained without the aid of such wicked means. If, in the healthy and uninjured human body we can often, by external observation, perceive remarkable changes, produced by fear, pain, hunger, weariness, and a thousand other affections, how much greater must be the changes caused by the dreadful wounds and cruel mangling of the dissector in internal parts, whose structure is far more delicate, and which are placed in circumstances altogether unusual ?" And again, "The prudent physician will acquire, in the course of his pratice,

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a larger number of facts than he could ever obtain by dissections ; and he will, moreover, have the satisfaction that, while endeavouring to save life and performing offices of mercy, he is acquiring that knowledge which others vainly seek to obtain by inflicting death and performing deeds of dire cruelty !"

This testimony of an ancient heathen may well put to shame our modern vivisectors, not merely on moral grounds, but on the ground of sound science. Our great English moralist, Samuel Johnson, has dealt with the subject in one of his essays ("The Idler," No. 17), where he says, "What is alleged in defence of these hateful practices every one knows ; but the truth is that by knives, fire, and poisons knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. I know not that by living dissections (vivisection) any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations."

It may be said that Dr. Johnson, not being a professional man, spoke in ignorance and with prejudice. Let us hear the testimony of Dr. Barclay, the founder of our own splendid museum in the Hall of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh, and the honoured master of many eminent physicians and surgeons. In his book "On the Muscular Motions" (p. 298), Dr. Barclay says, "In making experiments on live animals, even where the species of respiration is the same as our own, anatomists must often witness phenomena that can be phenomena only of rare occurrence. . . . Considering that our breathing is varied by heat and cold, by pleasure and pain, by every strong mental emotion, by the different states of health and disease, by different attitudes, and different exertions—we can hardly suppose that an animal under the influence of horror, placed in a forced and unnatural attitude, its viscera exposed to the stimulus of air, its blood flowing out, many of its muscles divided by the knife, and its nervous system driven to violent desultory action from excruciating pain, would exhibit the phenomena of ordinary respiration. If different anatomists, after seeing different species of animals, or different individuals of the same species, respiring under different experiments of torture, were each to conclude that the phenomena produced in these cases were analogous to those of ordinary respiration, their difference of opinion as to motions of ordinary respiration would be immense."

Dr. Barclay's statements have regard to respiration, but will equally apply to every subject investigated in a similar manner. I refrain from giving details of such experiments as they would only cause pain to sensitive readers. They are well known to readers of foreign journals, and I shall only say that they are disgraceful alike to the physiologists who have perpetrated the horrors, and to those of the medical profession who have approved and sanctioned them. But will it be believed that an English physician, a duly qualified M.D., performed the following experiments, and recorded them in the "Reports of St. Bartholomew's Hospital." He took a number of cats, and cutting open their sides, when under the influence of chloroform, tied up their bile ducts, and left them to expire slowly from the consequences of the operation. The professed object was to ascertain the changes in the liver, by examining under the microscope the morbid conditions resulting from his experiments. He preferred, he tells us, cats to dogs, because dogs have been found to live only from five to ten days, whereas some of the cats lingered for more than three weeks. Two of the cats were fortunate enough to die after two days of agony. One "old white cat" lingered for four days. One, which survived about a fortnight, is described as being "very feeble ; when tumbled over it had great difficulty in regaining its feet." Two of the poor creatures lingered till the twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth days, when they were killed ! The results of the experiments were, for any practical purpose, utterly worthless, and the whole affair was an example of pitiless and stupid cruelty. The wonder is that his "Barts" colleagues or pupils did not indignantly protest against proceedings which Abernethy, the pride and ornament of their school, would have regarded with disgust and horror.

Another "scientific" operator experimented on monkeys, destroying, with knives or with red hot irons, or in other ways, portions of the brain, in order to discover the uses and functions of the various parts of the encephalon !

Another operated on dogs—terriers and collies—animals with equal intelligence to their torturers, and with far higher moral qualities, in order to ascertain the effects of certain purgatives on their internal organs !

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But enough of these abominations, done in our own day by Englishmen of the same honoured profession which was in former times adorned by physicians like Sydenham and Mead, Gregory and Abercrombie, and by surgeons like Bell and Liston, Syme and Fergusson.

The present writer was a student at the University of Edinburgh from 1830 to 1841, taking the degree of M.A. in 1836, and that of M.D. in 1838. I went through a very complete medical and surgical curriculum, attending the classes both in college and in extra-academical schools. During three years I was under Dr. Robert Knox, and Fergusson. Dr. W. P. Alison was at that time Professor of Physiology and the Institutes of Medicine. The practice of vivisection was in those days almost unknown in our country, and no experiments on living animals were ever shown in the lectures. Dr. Fletcher, a favourite pupil of Abernethy, in his published "Introductory Lecture to Physiology," says, "During many years' experience in lecturing I have never found it necessary, in a single instance, to expose a suffering animal, even to students of medicine (who are necessarily, in some degree, familiarized with sights of horror), for the purpose of elucidating any point in physiology." This was the universal opinion of medical teachers in those days all over the kingdom.

In 1837 I went to Paris, with Edward Forbes and two or three fellow-students. Of course we went to the class-room of M. Majendie, then in the height of his popularity. Two or three visits were enough for us. We were repelled, not merely by the demonstrations of the operator, but by witnessing the monkey-tiger spirit of the students around. Recollecting that scene, one can understand better the words of Dr. S. Haughton, of Dublin, who said in his evidence before the Vivisection Commission, "I would shrink with horror from accustoming large classes of young men to the sight of animals under vivisection. I believe many of them would become cruel and hardened, and would go away and repeat those experiments recklessly. Science would gain nothing, and the world would have let loose upon it a set of young devils."

After returning to Edinburgh it was gratifying to find that the feeling was still strong against the horrible cruelties of foreign schools. Dr. Burdon Sanderson, of Oxford, said that "he wished to see the type of education more like the type of education in Germany." He has got his wish. At the last meeting of the British Association, when the Marquis of Salisbury was president, I went to see the laboratory behind the Ashmolean Museum. There were no operations going on, but the rooms for experimenting looked ghastly places, even though no howling or quivering victims were on the tables. It was a disgrace to the majority of Convocation to vote money for such a torture chamber. It is a disgrace to degrade our English schools of medicine to the level of those on the Continent. Sir Henry Acland, the veteran ex-professor at Oxford, who in his early days lived with Dr. W. P. Alison, at Edinburgh, for a year, must mournfully witness the present state of affairs. In his evidence before the Commission he said that he feared "many persons engage in vivisection not for a humane purpose, but for acquiring abstract knowledge." "They deal with those wonderful and beautiful organisms just as they deal with physical bodies that have no feeling and consciousness." This was manifest in the evidence of Dr. Klein, who said that "a physiologist could not be expected to devote time and thought to inquiring what the animal feels while he is doing the experiment." He confessed that "he uses anæsthetics for convenience sake in operating on dogs or cats, and for no other animals, as a general rule." Dr. Klein formerly practised in Vienna, and he said that he had never known of the hostility to vivisection which is shown in this country, not by physiologists, but by the general public."

Let us hope that this hostility will increase. The feeling against it, prevalent among all men of culture, in every profession, is strong ! Sir Arthur Helps said that "every man known to have practised needless cruelties should be placed under a social ban." This is not so easily effected. A man will be ready to get the help of Mephistopheles himself for his wife or family if known to be skilful as a surgeon. More hope lies in the diffusion of knowledge among the people, and proving that sound science is on the side of humanity on this question.

(To be completed in February.)