If Mr. Cross finds his Act to check and restrain
Vivisection losing all respect with the public, it will be chiefly, we believe, because he has granted a licence for a third series of the cruel experiments made by Professor Rutherford in the Edinburgh laboratory, on the effects of particular drugs on the bile- secretion of dogs. These experiments are exceedingly severe ones. In the case of the first and second series at least, they lasted eight hours each, during which the poor creatures sub- jected to them,-36 in all, in the first two series,—were put re- peatedly to surgical anguish, in order to submit the liver to the action of some new drug, introduced by the help of the knife, though, under the paralysing influence of curari, the dogs had no power to display their sufferings. In the third series licensed since the passing of the Act, the same method has been confessedly adopted, though we do not know the number of the victims. The British Medical ,Taltrual of last week classified the results of these horrible experiments, the article concluding with some most absurdly irrelevant remarks, by Professor , Rutherford, on the contemptible ignorance and inconsistency of those who object on principle to extracting medical know- ledge from the deliberate torture of brutes. Professor Ruther- ford says, of these benighted persons, "Though profuse with their ingratitude, I doubt not that one and all of them will be very ready and eager to profit by the results of our labour ; for
I believe them to be much too recreant and craven-hearted to allow themselves to refuse all medical aid, and thus to push their ill-conditioned logic to its practical issue." This is a very strange kind of reproach. Would Professor Rutherford approve of a disguised policeman's instigating an accom- plished cracksmau to a burglary, in order that he might derive from it a lesson on the best mode of preventing bur- glary ? Of course not. Yet, if that burglary had taken place without the policeman's knowledge and against his wish, would he disapprove of the same policeman's deriving from the burglar's feat all the instruction he could for the prevention of future burglaries ? If not, on what pretence does he reproach those who would on no account get their own diseases cured at the cost of torturing a fellow-creature,—whether human or canine,—with not refusing to avail themselves of the medical results obtained ? No sane statesman ever yet declined to learn a lesson from the horrible story of the Inquisition, on so ridiculous a ground as that he would—if he could but have annihilated the past—have willingly deprived himself of the instruction afforded by that dark chapter in the history of the cruelty of educated men's intellectual and moral zeal.
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