PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " BPECTATOR.1 SIR,—The facts brought forward and remarked upon in your- article on "The Coward Science" form a danger-signal, which the public at their peril will neglect to note. English law, in the interests of society, compels Us virtually to submit our- selves and our dying friends into the hands of some licensed practitioners. It grants to such licensed. practitioners that monopoly of practice • which, in their corporate capacity, they enjoy, and requires them in return to submit to certain rules and restrictions, by which the confidence of the public shall be assured. The Vivisection clique in the Medical profession, by secretly evading or refusing to conform to these regulations, are now undermining that confidence, and shaking the credit of the profession as a whole.
Suspicion follows secrecy like its shadow, The tortured brute may not be the only MIMS vile on which the modern scientist exerts his skill in the advancement of medicine by research. Obscure diseases afford, in many cases, a comparatively safe. field for experiment, as well as observation ; and our hospitals, we know, are tending more and more to become mere clinical schools, rather than refuges for the suffering poor. It is by the
:advocates of vivisection that lay supervision of medical charities is most strenuously opposed ; by them that lay knowledge of medical subjects is decried as a "dangerous thing ;" by them that "Parliamentary interference" is resented openly, and ovasion of the law is practised secretly. Conscience refuses to believe that the Creator can have made the "good of ihumanity " dependent on an art which even the heathen physician Celsus regarded as revolting and unnatural, and which is condemned as useless and misleading by many of the 'leaders of modern surgery.
But if such be the case, let it be practised by those outside the profession, not as a stepping-stone to success within it. Society has a perfect right, indeed is bound, to protect itself by law against those tendencies which the practice of vivisection can ,scarcely fail to foster, in men to whose professional control the law requires all—the weak, the poor, and the rich alike—to :submit themselves, as the hour of their last agony draws near.
am, Sir, &c.,
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