Our contemporary the Lancet has read "with equal astonish- ment
and pain" our remarks of a fortnight ago on Dr. Wickham Legg's painful vivisections at St. Bartholomew's, and our ex-
pression of the hope that the Governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital will not mark their approval of that practice by
giving him high office there. The " astonishment " at least was
unpardonable. If we have made any one thing clear in these columns, we hope it is our opinion of the practice of inflicting long-enduring suffering on the lower animals for the sake of scientific research. As for the "pain," it is probably not so great as that with which we read Dr. Legg's own account of his experiments on the sixteen eats.
It is, we fear, quite true, as the Lancet says, that" with Dr. Legg would fall a host of men whose names have a European reputa-
tion for their contributions to our knowledge of disease and of its treatment." But we cannot help that. We want to see the law respected in England, and we are quite mire that vivisections which are not guarded both by administering efficient aniesthetics at the time, and by destroying the animals operated on before they awaken to the sufferings resulting from the operation, are, at least when inflicted on domestic animals, an offence against the second section of 12 and 13 Victoria, c. 92, and liable to be visited with a summary penalty under that section. Dr. Legg did give chloroform to his sixteen cats, but he did not destroy them before they began to suffer from the results of the operations.
On the contrary, some of them lingered for weeks, and lingered most miserably for many days. It seems to us in the highest
degree reasonable and proper to urge on the managers of a great public institution that they shall not appoint a physician, however able and eminent,--as we doubt not that Dr. Legg is,— who frankly and publicly connects their institution with practices probably illegal, and certainly opposed to the spirit of the law, to a high and responsible office in their service.
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