by Ouida
The Spectator has lately drawn public attention to an admirable work published at Lausanne, and written by M. Jules Charles Scholl. It is a thorough exposure of the untruths foisted on the world in general by the professors of vivisection when they lament that they are denied “one rat,” or only claim “a few mice and rabbits,” and when they put forward the equally untrue assertion that their experiments are all performed under chloroform. I will ask the reader to peruse the following extract from the work of M. Scholl, which I give in the excellent translation made by the Spectator: —
Plastering a terrier’s muzzle with gypsum. Varnishing and oil-painting dogs and rabbits (varied in a “very interesting” manner by the thickness of the coat of paint and the surface covered). Injecting chromic acid into the crania of dogs and rabbits. Experiments on the pancreas, by dragging it with pincers out of a wound in the side, and replacing it with tubes sticking in it; the record commencing by the observation that “the organ is so extremely sensitive, that it is necessary to choose animals which can best sustain pain.” Fifteen tormentors engaged in galvanising the pneumo-gastric nerves and the heart Application of pus from one animal to others in manifold ways, always occasioning disease and death. Baking of animals alive in stoves by Delaroche and Berger, as well as by Bernard; a table of time needful to kill dogs of equal size at various degrees of heat — maximum, thirty minutes; minimum, eighteen, at one hundred and twenty Centigrade, Innumerable operations on the vertebral column, remarked by Cyon to be “perhaps the most painful operation of all for the animal.’’ Beclard praises Bernard for “a most ingenious proceeding for taking away altogether the spinal nerve from a living animal. It consists in seizing the spinal nerve at the hole opened in the backhand effecting, by tearing it out, the destruction of its roots.” Blatin mentions hearing Flourens say that Majendie had sacrificed four thousand dogs to prove Bell’s theory of the nerves, and four thousand more to disprove the same; and that he, Flourens, had shown, by vivisecting still some thousands more, that Bell was right. Next come experiments on the brain. Dr. Munk, of Berlin, condemns Ferner. His examinations (Munk says) were done in a totally inefficient manner. Erroneous results have followed. The principles laid down by Ferner differ in nothing from an arbitrary edifice, and his other views are utterly worthless (ebenso werthlos). For himself, Munk says, “I have procured twenty-nine animals for experimenting on the ape. I lost eight. On the rest I practised about fifty experiments, on the visual and the tactile sphere. The number was small compared to my experiments on dogs, owing to the rarity of the material.” Again and over again the sensibility and intelligence of the mutilated monkeys were tested by the whip, or by lighted matches burning their muzzles; and after extirpating portions of its brain, a dog was kept without water for days, waiting its last mutilation. Another blinded and mutilated creature resisted the operator’s blows (Prügel) to make it move. Sometimes the victims are kept alive for months, but this is said to be difficult, “because the mutilated hemispheres of the brain become excessively sensitive, and the terror and anguish which are the consequences of the operations (Schrecken und Angst) bring on inflammations,” &c. Such things, however, are described by the vivisector as “beautiful [schöne] cerebral inflammations;” and he proceeds to still more “interesting” observations. Herr Goltz (another rival of Professor Ferrier’s, and the honoured guest of the British public at the recent Congress) is in the habit of “rinsing out the brain,” making it squirt forth out of a hole “like a mushroom.” Here is one of his cases: A vigorous bull-dog on November 8th, 1875, had two holes made in his skull; the brain rinsed. Became blind, November 10th. December 11th, ablation of the eye. January 10th, 1876, another trepaning, and more brain rinsed out; the dog becomes idiotic. February 5th, third rinsing of brain; a purulent meningitis sets in, and the dog dies February 15th. Similar histories of other dogs are repeated again and again, with the same remarks on the growing blindness, idiocy, and helplessness of the victims. In one case, on a fourth operation, “there was not room left for another hole on the left side, so a large space of bone between the old and new holes was broken down.” A “remarkable” experiment is made by putting the blinded dog on a table, and trying to make him jump down. Then followed an “interesting” experiment of squirting water on the animal, and making it, in its terrer, “knock itself against a chair, laid purposely in its way.” Twice more was this dog mutilated, and then it died of meningitis. The sum-total of results was: “the dogs all lost the faculty of using the right paw.” Professor Goltz also tried experiments on the nerves — on a vigorous young water-spaniel, a grey poodle, a well-fed lap-dog, a small and feeble spaniel (two operations, the second being the section of the spinal marrow), a Pomeranian dog (same as the spaniel), a large famishing Dorfhund (tortured from October to April, when, after second section of the spinal marrow, it died of purulent meningitis). The experiments of M. Paul Bert (the new Minister of Worship and Instruction in France) are numbered by hundreds, and are perhaps the most terrible of all. A dog (No. 278 of his victims), described as a “new dog,” because not hitherto tortured, is placed under the compression of eight atmospheres from 3.56 P.M. to 4.45 P.M. When taken out of the machine, its throat is full of foam, its paws are stiff, its whole body in tonic convulsions. By five o’clock the convulsions are of extreme violence, the eyes are convulsed. At half-past five fresh convulsions are excited by shaking the table and pushing a thermometer into the body. The animal grinds its teeth as if to crush them. At eleven next morning it is found lying still, with permanent contraction of the limbs, and dies in the course of the day. Another dog (No. 286), withdrawn from the machine in convulsions, becomes stiffened, so that “the animal may be carried by one paw, like a piece of wood.” A cat subjected to the same experiment feebly mews and crawls on its fore-paws, and, when dissected, shows a marrow “which flows like cream.” (Ayez Pitié! Quelques Mots sur l’Urgence d’ Abolir Totalement la Vivisection. Par Jules Charles Scholl. I vol. Lausanne: Imer et Payot. 1881.)
It is not needful to have a very high opinion of the human race to yet believe that were these systematic tortures fully understood by or revealed to the world in general, it would refuse to sanction them.
Sentiment is the contumelious charge with which all opposition to these brutal experiments is met by those who practise them: it is an easy form of abuse. Every noble movement of the world has been saddled with this name, from patriotism to the abolition of slavery; and every impersonal impulse of the human race is necessarily one of sentiment — i.e. of spiritual and generous, as opposed to gross and merely egotistic, inspirations. But is opposition to animal vivisection merely generous feeling? Is it not also a movement of self-defence? This is what seems to me to escape the sight of those who treat of this matter, and it is what I now propose to submit to the judgment of the reader.
There is not a single argument used by the advocates of vivisection which will not apply in as complete an entity to human as to animal subjects.
The argument, in chief, is that the end justifies the means. This, being once admitted, must apply to and sanction no less the use of human lives for the purpose of experiment. It is declared that the inferior organisation is justly and fittingly sacrificed in order to ultimately benefit the higher. This, being once accepted, must legalise equally the surrender to scientific torture of all idiots, of all criminals, of all persons suffering from incurable disease, and, indeed, logically, must include all the brutalised and ignorant classes of the population, whose lives are valueless to the community at large where they are not, as they most often are, harmful and noxious to it There is not a single argument brought forward for the vivisection of animal life which does not demand more imperiously, and without any manner of doubt, the submission to the practice of experiments of all the lower and the baser forms of human existence. Nay, the argument is far stronger; for if it be admissible to torture the so-called lower forms of sentient life, which are quite innocent of harm, and, indeed, are useful to the worl
d in their humble and obedient manner, it must be far more natural and desirable to give up to the knife of the vivisector those multitudes of men who are either absolutely useless in their generation or actively baneful to it If the lesser life be justifiably sacrificed to the higher; if the benefits resulting from vivisection be so indisputably great that they justify the torment by which they are obtained; then there can be no shadow of reason to deny to the experimentalist the hordes of our prisons, the roughs of our thieves’ alleys, the incurables of our hospitals, the mendicants and the idlers of our abundant pauperism. The horse, the dog, the lamb, the mule, are all useful in their several ways, and have done no ill; but there are tens of thousands of human beings in every country of Europe who are of no earthly use to any living thing, who do but cumber the earth they pollute, who are at their best mere lumps of sodden flesh, and are at their worst dangerous and poisonous elements of society. Why do not the professors of vivisection claim these?
It is what they will do, what they must do, by the sheer logical sequence of their own demands, if their sacrifice of animal life continues to be condoned and supplied.
Now, is the world prepared to accept this result? It is not, and vivisectors are at present afraid to suggest it; but in a generation or two they will not be thus timid, and they will use the arguments by which they now enforce their claims to the living bodies of animals to procure the living bodies of men. There is no sort of reason why they should not do so. They justify vivisection of animals by pointing to the sacrifices of animals made to sport and food; they will be able yet more effectively to justify their vivisection of human creatures by pointing to the sacrifices of human creatures made in war, in mines, in factories, and by famine.
When I was a little child, my father asked me what may seem a strange question: whether I would not, if I could, die to save ten thousand Chinese from martyrdom. I said, in childlike selfishness, “No; that I cared for myself, and not for the Chinese;” whereon he half gravely, half jestingly, showed me that I was a very sadly selfish little mortal. I never forgot the lesson. Now, the lesson, on the contrary, which the laboratory of the vivisectionist teaches to that sadly selfish child, the world, is, that each unit of it should sacrifice ten thousand victims, or ten millions, if thereby he has the smallest chance of knowing better how to cure his own finger-ache. Put at its best and highest meaning, the sole meaning of the vivisectionist is that if man thereby gets the smallest particle of benefit, or the merest crumb of knowledge, by doing so, he has a right to torture throughout centuries all other sentient beings in every possible manner.
The plea is ignoble, like all egotism. These high-priests of science, who would ridicule the idea of any belief in Adam, are yet eager to proclaim, with him, that all the beasts of the field are subject to them. Granted that they are so subject by reason of their helplessness, shall that helplessness forever cease to be a title to forbearance and to gentleness? Yes; in the laboratory, as in pagan Rome, there is no altar to Pity. “Squeamish ness” and “sentiment” is the physiologists’ only retort to those who discover and display the foul secrets of their hidden chambers: they would take the “ten thousand Chinese” for their experimental tortures gladly, if they dared; and I fail to see how they could say less than “squeamish” and “sentimental” to any plea that might be put forward to save the Chinamen from the torture-trough. They could add, with a fair show of truth, that Chinamen are accustomed to torture.
It has been well said that vivisectors exhibit no new qualities: they display precisely the same brutality and the same fanaticism as did the priests of the Inquisition, or any other sect of religious torturers. Their work, even if its necessity be granted, must be a terrible and ghastly necessity; but to them it is, as all their language concerning it declares, a very rapture of cruelty, precisely as was theirs to Torquemada and his servitors. It is strangely useless for them to deny this, as Virchow denies it, in face of their published records, which anyone may peruse for himself, though few of the general multitude will do so, or even know they can do so, although the endeavour to popularise science is doing its utmost to teach the schoolboy that there is longer and more exquisite torture to be got out of the cat or the dog than his primitive methods of hunting them could afford to him.
Intolerant, like all fanatical persecutors, of any opposition, the professors and defenders of vivisection would, if they could, imprison and suppress all who disagree with them, as implacably as any persecutors in priestly garb have ever done. Their language shows the ready, if as yet impotent, disposition to persecute. In lieu of any argument, they use coarse words, and deny with a mere unblushing lie the charges founded against them on their own published reports of their operations. When a plain question is put to them, they avoid it by some subterfuge. Not long since, an English vivisector was asked in print, if the end justified the means, what hindered him from using human infants for experiment? He answered that he would operate on a baby at any cost of pain to it, to do it service. Observe the fallacy of the reply. A diseased baby operated on for its own sake is not at all in the same position as a healthy or even a diseased baby operated on for the sheer sake of possible physiological discoveries.
This is the sort of illogical reply with which physiologists consider that they refute their opponents. In the same utterly false manner the experiments made under anaesthetics are dragged forth exultantly to the public sight; whilst the hundreds of experiments are carefully concealed which keep animals skinned, with every nerve laid bare, fastened down, for days and nights together, under the pressure of atmospheric machines; or through half a year practises on the brain, removing piece by piece, atom by atom, until at last idiocy follows, to be closed in death.
As yet, they are timid and hypocritical. They sigh that they only ask “one rat,” whilst they know that, in their laboratories all the world over, thousands of sentient creatures are being cut open alive, roasted, crucified, larded with nails, galvanised, sent into convulsions, kept breathing in torture for months, subjected to the most excruciating agonies by experiments on the most sensitive organs of their bodies. They are as yet afraid that the great public of the nations should come to realise what their work really is, what their torture-chambers really are, and they use as yet artistic falsehoods to cover up that which they do and hide it from the eyes of the multitude. But in a little while, if unchecked now, they will cast off these disguises; these trained torturers will get tired of merely tying down the Newfoundland dog in the trough, and fetching the Nile crocodile to the Paris laboratory; they will cast aside periphrasis, and openly declare, what they now do say amongst themselves, that without human subjects no true results can be ascertained. And when they do this, who shall say them nay? Not those who now maintain for them that the end justifies the means.
What better can become of the puny infant, the scrofulous cripple, the sickly woman, the useless drunkard, the homeless worn-out prostitute, the criminal wasting his strength in the hulks, than to be offered up upon the torture-table of the physiological laboratories to the glory of science and the verification of its theories?
Mr. Gurney, in his recent article on Vivisection in the Cornhill Magazine, touches on this future question, but touches too briefly. He appears not to care to face all that it involves; which, indeed, is momentous and ghastly enough to daunt the boldest man.
He does so touch on it in quoting the words of Dr. Willis: “The rocks are broken and put in the crucible, the water is submitted to analysis, the plant is dissected,” and “in animal life the same method must be adopted to unlock the secrets of nature. The question of the animal being sensitive cannot alter the mode of investigation.” Mr. Gurney adds thereto pregnantly the conclusion that neither could the question of the animal being human. But here he pauses. He does not dare, or does not care, to follow his conclusion out in its full bearing. Further on, indeed (inconsistently enough), Mr. Gurney himself adds, with apologetic tone, that, “though in many cases a mere chance, a mere grain of kno
wledge, is set against the certainty of suffering, this goes for nothing if now and again the thousand chances throw up, or the thousand grains sink into, a single result” And he does not appear to see that here also, if in any logical manner followed, the argument used for animal sacrifice must apply to and justify human sacrifice.
He even endeavours considerably to palliate and understate the torture that goes on in the laboratories of Europe: perhaps he does not know of it; though, as he has read “La Fisiologia del Dolore,” he must have had some insight into its extent There appear to me two issues attached to the daily increasing claims of vivisectors, which no one has hitherto in any adequate manner put before the public. One of them is this certainty that in some future time, and a time probably very near to our own, vivisection will, unless checked, claim (and claim in the same terms and by the same plea as it now claims animal sacrifice) the right to possess itself of human subjects. The second, which is interwoven with the first, is one which no one has, it seems to me, as yet considered; i.e. the moral effect on the human character of this animal-torture.
Not very long since, I heard a very famous surgeon say, in allusion to his own skill of hand in operations, “Certainly, I killed forty or fifty people before I acquired my present dexterity with the knife; everyone buys experience.” He, fortunate person, had bought it at the expense of other people instead of at his own; and I the forty or fifty hapless victims to his early immaturity did not appear to weigh upon him with any sense of either regret or responsibility. It is this temper of absolute apathy or callousness to the sufferings of others which the hideous cruelties of the laboratory must intensify and confirm in all those whose education consists in executing or in watching them. Even were the physical benefits and physiological discoveries resulting from them ten thousand times more than they are, I think that such benefits and such discoveries would be far too dearly bought by the brutality and the cowardice which their pursuit involves.