THE RECENT DEBATE ON VIVISECTION.
[To THE EDITOR OY THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—In your remarks on the above subject, you assume that the aim of the speakers on the humanitarian side was primarily to attack Mr. Erichsen. I think they proposed the reduction of that gentleman's salary as the usual method—and, in the present state of business, the only available one—for bringing the abuses connected with his office before Parliament and the public.
Mr. Erichsen, no doubt, as you say, assumed a more moderate attitude on the Vivisection Commission than did Mr. Huxley (perhaps not a large admission) ; but it came to light on that occasion (Minutes, 6,459), that he had been himself an active vivisector; and the propriety of setting a vivisector to inspect vivisectors is, it must be confessed, an anomaly which would scarcely have been per- mitted where the smallest human interests were at stake. A Commissioner, for example, sitting judicially on an in- quiry—shall we say, into the mysteries of smuggling ?—who should find himself driven, by a witness innocently citing a
case in point, to intervene with the avowal, "It was / who lifted that keg," would surely not have been selected after- wards for a lucrative post in the Excise ? Be this as it may, however, it is not Mr. Erichsen's personal fitness or unfitness for his post which chiefly concerns us, but the whole system on which his reports, and those of his predecessor, Mr. Busk, have been uniformly prepared. Permit me to explain it to your readers, for it is a case of the Janus of Science" once more.
Vivisection has two aspects in England,—one, which is pre- sented to Parliament and the lay public in the Inspector's returns and reports ; the other, which is presented to the scientific world at home and abroad in the scientific journals, —e.g., in the Philosophical Transactions, in the Journal of Physiology, in Brain, in the Practitioner, and in the medical papers. I say it deliberately,—these two presentations are not only widely diverse, but absolutely irreconcilable. If one is true, the other is false. I have before me, and have just read over, making careful extracts (too long for your publica- tion, but which I will gladly send to any one desiring to see them), from the whole series of Vivisection Returns, from the first to this last, presented so opportunely, precisely while our debate was impending. In all these Reports there does not occur one single phrase which can be understood to designate the hideous experiments which during those years have been detailed at length in the scientific periodicals Above-named, as performed in Cambridge, London, and else- where in England. Over and over again the two Inspectors assure us that, in the year on which they report, the amount of pain inflicted was "wholly insignificant," or "scarcely involved any appreciable suffering ;" and they go out of their way to mention trivial experiments on rabbits, mice, and frogs, never once naming such animals as dogs, cats, monkeys, or horses. Put turn we now to the scientific papers, and here are samples of the multitudinous recent English viviseetions to be found therein :-
Monkeys.—Boring holes into the skull, and burning out with a -cautery portions of brain. Same animals operated on several times. Long series of experiments extending more than two years. Scooping away portions of the brain ; removing both occipital lobes. Producing blindness.
"Dogs.—Trephining; scraping out interior of tympanum (middle -ear) with sharp spoon ; rubbing the cavity with chloride of zinc (which destroys everything with which it comes in contact), and killing animals thirty-eight and twenty days after operation. Thirty-one experiments. Dogs starved for many hours ; abdomen -cut open ; bile ducts dissected out and cut; glass tubes inserted ; duct to gall-bladder closed ; various drugs placed in intestines. Chloroform not used, but curare. Cutting down through the loins of dogs and dissecting out kidneys ; placing these in metal boxes made to fit, and surrounding them with warm oil; injecting -drugs into a vein dissected out and watching result on secretion. The wind-pipe opened first and machine for artificial respiration set going, Curare used and some chloroform.
"Cats.—Baked until their blood-heat rose to 115.8 deg. Fahr. ; fixed so that they could not move ; vagi nerves cut and stimu- lated; digitalis injected under the skin ; temperature observed , until death resulted."
These experiments—(to which might be added dozens almost as bad, and which represent only those which the experi-
mentor thought successful enough to be presented to his scientific colleagues)—ought, I submit, to have been men- tioned in official reports offered to the nation as representing the working of the Act of 1876. In a country free as England, a law which sanctions a sin is itself a public sin—and that the Vivisection Act, as now worked through the Home Office and the Inspector, does sanction the great and heinous sin of cruelty, I think no one who reads the above heart-sickening list of tortures can doubt.
We anti-vivisectionists ask for true reports to Parliament; and we are perfectly satisfied that if but one such true report be ever presented, our Bill for the Total Prohibition of Vivi- section will be carried before the close of the Session.—I am,
Sir, &c., FRANCES POWER COBBE.
Hengurrt, Dolgelly, May 27th.
[The experiments on the brain were all, we assume, per- formed under really anwsthetic conditions, and the real question is whether the animal suffered on returning to con- sciousness,—suffered so much, for that is the only test of which we know, as not to take its food cheerfully. If so, there is a great scandal, and, as our correspondent says, a great case for public indignation. But that is, we believe, just what is warmly denied. We do not know when and by whom the raising of cats' temperature to 115 deg. was effected. That must, we believe, have been a very cruel ex- periment, and all its details should certainly have been care- fully described. Of the cruelty of the experiments referred to on dogs, we spoke emphatically ourselves.—En. Spectator.]
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