THE MASTER OF THE ROLLS ON EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH.
THE Association "for the Advancement of Medical Re- search," which was formed on Tuesday, played a very effective card in securing for one of their speakers the Master of the Rolls, whose influence is, no doubt, intended to counter- vail that of the Lord Chief Justice, who has lent the high judicial authority of his mind to a position which may, on the whole, be described as that assumed by this journal. We have a great respect for the Master of the Rolls. Probably no one of our Judges is entitled to greater respect for his masterly professional work. But we take the liberty of saying that on the point on which he is now lend- ing the great weight of his judgment to the public, for the better guidance of public opinion, he will not succeed in countervailing the influence of the Lord Chief Jus- tice, for this very excellent reason, that so far as his remarks are reported in the Standard—much the fullest report of the meeting which we have as yet seen—he did not take the trouble to apply his judgment to the only question on which public opinion is really, and not unjustifiably, disturbed, and anxious for guidance. Indeed, a more unsatisfactory meeting for the purpose of influencing public opinion,—that public opinion, we mean, which is really familiar with the perplexities of the question at issue,—we can hardly conceive. From the doctors we cannot expect, perhaps, any attempt to do more than expound the scientific advantages which may be gained from thoughtfully conceived experiments on living animals. But it is a disappointment to find that a great Judge like Sir George Jessel, and a thinking Bishop like the Bishop of Carlisle, who just touches the subject in a singularly unin- structive way in his paper on "Moral Duty towards Animals," in Macmillan's Magazine for this month, should deliver them- selves without, as far as we can see, the glimmering of a notion as to what the difficulty is on which the controversy turns. Whatever may be thought of the Lord Chief Justice's article and various speeches on the subject, this, at all events, cannot be said of him, that he evades the point of the question. The Master of the Rolls has evaded the point of the question,— the only point on which any moderate and thoughtful oppo- nent of the ordinary scientific view of vivisection grounds his opposition to it.
All that the Master of the Rolls asserts, is what no one of much authority is so rash as to deny,—that the experimental method, when applied to living animals, is capable of yielding results which might be of high importance to the healing science, and probably have been of some importance,—though how much is a very moot point amongst the experts. On this ground, and on this ground alone, Sir George Jessel wishes "God speed" to those who are endeavouring, "by means of science, to alleviate the sufferings of the human race." Mr. Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society, follows in precisely the same tone. He "ventured to say they had undertaken to help towards the decision of the great, nay, the all-important, question,—whether medicine should wait upon time and circumstance, upon the accidents of life, upon the habits, or even whims of society and fashion, or whether, with
earnest thought and firm hand, it should form circumstance to its needs, turn accident to good purpose, and wrest from Nature that which she freely gave to him that asketh, but which she resolutely withheld from the listless bystander ; whether, in short, medicine should remain and be for ever re- legated to the limbo of observation, or whether it should become an experimental science." The Bishop of Carlisle goes a little nearer the mark, but starts aside just as he is approach- ing it, in the unsatisfactory paper to which we have referred : —"I confess that I am quite unable to understand how thoughtful persons can bring themselves to believe that our moral duty towards animals forbids us altogether to inflict pain upon them for the purposes of physiological science ; on the other hand, it seems impossible to deny that the power of inflicting pain may be abused, and that the animals,— domestic animals especially,—have a claim to some guaran- tee that they shall not be treated cruelly, or made the subjects of unnecessary suffering." Well, the whole meaning of that passage depends on what the Bishop means by "cruelly," and what he means by "unnecessary suffering ; ' and at that point, the only point of the least im- portance, he deserts us altogether. We venture to assert that even the most judicial minds cannot do much for any cause they happen to take up, without steadily applying their judi- cial faculties to the difficult points which those causes raise. This is just what the Master of the Rolls, the President of the Royal Society, and the Bishop of Cailisle do not do, and while they continue to evade the difficulty of their position, their influence will be trivial.
The one point for the new Association for Medical Research is this :—Do they, or do they not, put any limit to the pain which they are ready to inflict on the living subjects of their experiments, for a sufficiently considered scientific end ? Not a speaker at the meeting of Tuesday gave the slightest hint that there was any such limit ; not one of them all repre- hended Professor Rutherford's awful series of experiments on dogs under curari, made for the no doubt strictly scientific and yet utterly trivial purpose of finding out the drugs, which, if artificially introduced into the bile duct, most stimulated the secretion of bile in tortured dogs. The doctors, indeed, as a class, disavow any limit on the pain which it is justifiable to inflict, in the most specific way. The public cannot endure that no such limit should be acknowledged, but the Master of the Rolls ignores the whole issue. Now, has the Master of the Rolls considered this question, or has he not ? If he has not, we do not in the least appreciate the value of his high judicial authority, for he has simply not applied his judgment at all to the one knotty point. Nobody of any sense denies that a most valuable scientific result might be deduced from a well-considered scientific experiment, involving torture, even though it were inflicted on a British Judge. But every one of the smallest sense would condemn such an experiment, not only as criminal, which is a matter determined by law, but as immoral, which is not a matter determined by law at all. Now, why should it be immoral to inflict great torture, by experi- menting carefully, in the interests of science, on a human being, and perfectly moral to inflict the same torture in experi- menting carefully, in the interests of science, on a dog ? This question clearly is not to be answered on the utilitarian ground. It is perfectly true that good men, especially when they happen to be of eminent ability, are much too valuable to waste on such experiments, for it happens that there is an only too large class of the community at our disposal for such experiments, whose bodies are just as good for the purpose of solving the physiological problems in question as are those of the most eminent men, and who, far from being of value to us as human beings, would disappear without exciting any thing but a feeling of relief. Yet it is deemed, and rightly deemed wrong, to torture criminals for the purposes of physiological research, even though these criminals injure the community to which they belong as no mere animal's existence could possibly injure it. The utilitarian answer, therefore, fails entirely. What other answer can be given ? If it be said that as all the lower creatures' life is confessedly subordinate to the purposes of the life of man, so their sufferings, however great, must be regarded as equally subordinate to the allevia- tion of the sufferings of man, an answer has been given, but is it a true answer ? Why in the world because a man's life, with or without its sufferings, is a more sacred and more important thing to the world than a dog's life or an elephant's, does it follow that the nobler being should have the right to torture the ignobler, in order to obtain for himself a little relief from
pain ? Does not that very process cancel the assumed nobility on which the plea is founded? Ought not a nobler being to feel the shame of extracting assuagements for himself from the unlimited torture of lower creatures ? If the new Asso- ciation are prepared to put any limits on that torture, let them tell us at once what those limits are. If they are not,—if they approve of torturing scores of dogs to measure the power of cer- tain drugs to stimulate the secretion of bile,—if they think the individual physiologist is, when sufficiently educated, in his right in submitting any question whatever to which he believes that he can obtain an intelligible answer, to the ordeal of painful or even excruciating experiment, we warn them that the popular judgment is not only clearly adverse, but justly ad- verse, that their new experimentations will be most jealously watched, and that two very different results of the new de- parture are, at least, equally probable. If they succeed in bringing out the strongest possible contrast between the humanity and reticence of their own proceedings, and those of the great French, and German, and Italian physiologists, some of whom they are never weary of panegyrising,—of Claud Bernard, of Paul Bert, of Schiff, of Ludwig, of Mantegazza, —then they may, perhaps, obtain popular toleration for the law as it stands. But if they are drawn on, as we fear they may be, by the logic of their principles, to the multiplica- tion of experiments like Professor Rutherford's and Claud Bernard's, then they will bring upon themselves a cry for the strengthening of the present law which the authority of no assemblage of great names,—scientific, or judicial, or even episcopal,—will be strong enough to resist.
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