A PATHETIC INCIDENT IN A PHYSIOLOGICAL LABORATORY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR "]
SIR,—Your well-known love for animals encourages me to hope you will find room for an account of one of the most touching incidents of animal affection ever recorded. The account is to
be found in an article by C. Egerton Jennings, F.R.C.S., in the Lancet of November 22nd. The scene is a physiological labora- tory. A dog has undergone a terrible experimental operation,— removal of part of the bowels. The operation, though performed under anassthetics, is one which necessarily entails very acute after-sufferings. It is the second night after this operation, and the dog is left in its pain, tied so that it cannot move. But it is not left altogether without a sympathiser. "During the night another dog, tied up in the same room, slipped its collar, and bit through the cord which secured the subject of the experiment." At ten o'clock the next morning it was found that "the dressings were removed, and both dogs had been running about the room." Let your readers picture to themselves what happened in the darkness of that awful night. One dog, tied down and unable to stir, is crying in pain. Another—awaiting the same fate—hearing the cries, struggles till it frees itself to go to the sufferer's help. Thinking the cords that bind it may be the cause of its pain, it gnaws them through. Next, the dressings are torn off; and as this brings no relief, the victim rushes round the room in its agony, with its sympathising friend at its side. At last it can run no longer ; and the ex- perimenter, on his arrival, finds it lying on its side. "The abdomen was tympanitic, and very painful to the touch." It is a comfort to learn that the dog died at 11.45 a.m., after a dose of atropia given with that object.
Thus ended the tragedy. The "subject of the experiment" was, we are told, "a black-and-tan bitch weighing 16.3 lb." The "
subject" of the next experiment—in all likelihood the sym- pathising friend of the first—" a bitch weighing 16 3 lb." The powers of love and sympathy in the hearts of these creatures, and their sensitiveness to pain, cannot be weighed, and so do not enter into the calculations of the experimenters. All the experiments failed.—I am, Sir, Sac., JOHN H. CLARKE, M.D.
15 St. George's Terrace, Gloucester Road, S.W „November 25th.
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