A memorial to the President, Vice-President, and Council of the
Royal College of Surgeons was published in the Medical Press of last Saturday, which will give a great shock to all who dread the rapid diffusion in England of the methods of the late Paul Bert and Claude Bernard, of Professor Schiff, Professor Ludwig, and all the other distinguished Continental physio- logists. It is a memorial signed by some of the weightiest scientific men of our day, entreating the College of Surgeons to devote Sir Erasmus Wilson's recent bequest to the foundation in London of a great institution for " physiological and pathological research" which may compete with the great institutions of the same kind in Berlin, Paris, Leipzig, and other' i of the great foreign capitals. We do not deny that such e s institution, if founded, may push forwards the work of di oovery. It is improbable that it would not. But if it does, it will be at the cost of injuring so frightfully the moral tone of the students who frequent it, that we believe the medical profession will suffer by it far more seriously than any scientific gain can compensate. We see, with great regret, that Mr. Erichsen, who sat on the Vivisection Commission, and who has recently been appointed her Majesty's Inspector under the Act of 1876, is one of the memorialists. His tone on the Commission was uniformly moderate and humane, though he did not condemn in principle the practice of painful vivisection. But as he is now the one official check on abuses of that practice in this country, he ought, we think, to have abstained from asking for the founda- tion of an institution which must so seriously multiply and intensify the dangers which he is appointed to minimise or prevent. We have elsewhere commented on the cynical pro- posal to found this institution as one mode of cementing more closely together the Queen's Colonial Empire.
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