In a very weighty letter to Monday's Times, Miss Cobbe
points out that the inoculation experiments of which the sup- porters of the proposed equivalent in England for the Pasteur Institute make so little, often involve a frightful amount of pain. Dr. Klein, in his report for 1885-86, described the way in which he inoculated the subjects of experiment with the comma bacillus thus :—" In these experiments made on dogs, rabbits, and guinea-pigs, the abdominal cavity is opened, the duodenum is drawn out, and into its cavity comma bacilli from an artificial cultivation are injected." In reference to the animals inoculated with the microcoecus of scarlatina, the post-mortem showed that they had suffered from inflammation of the lungs and bowels, and from peritonitis,—all of them most painful diseases, especially the last. Of course there are inoculations and inoculations,—some which lead only to an easy death, some which involve sufferings far from light, and to which a speedy end is not put because the investigators wish to see all the results produced by their inoculations. We may be sure that the English Institute of Preventive Medicine, if it is ever established, will prevent nothing so much as a humane treatment of the creatures from whom the pathologists hope to derive new knowledge.
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