The Times, which, after a certain amount of hesitation, adopted
finally, with a certain enthusiasm, the cause of Vivisection and all that is contained under that name, made a proposal in its outside sheet of Wednesday to set on foot a systematic investigation of the remedies for the disease which causes" madness in dogs, by the hopeful process of inducing it, through artificial inoculation, in healthy specimens,—the only method, as the writer of the article assures the public, that can ever produce any satisfactory result in the way of prevention or cure. When a professor of the heal- ing art sets about his work by infecting the healthy with a frightful disease, and moreover, dogmatically asserts that this certain addition to the misery of the world affords the only hope of alleviating it, we cannot help asking why, if it be the only method with dogs, it is not also the only method with men ? Experiments in the inoculation of serious disease are never tried, —openly or confessedly, at least,—with human beings, and yet the medical profession do not assure us that they have no hope of ever adding to the number of remedies at their command. We believe the truth to be that the Government experiments on in- oculation with cholera-poison and other such diseases, though they have yielded some valuable results in the way of warning,—with respect to the avenues of contagion, and so forth,—have hardly in any instance as yet yielded so much as one valuable remedy. It is most probable that if the experiments proposed for the inoculation of rabies take place, they will result in yielding a good number of wretched patients, but no cures. The enthusiasts for vivisection seem to think, that, with the lower animals at least, if you make them jump into a quick-set bush, and scratch out both their eyes, you are quite sure to discover how to make them jump into the quick-set bush, and scratch them in again. That, however, was only the sanguine endeavour, not the achievement, of the wise "man of Thessaly " who first set that valuable example.
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