IN HOSPITAL

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 50, 28 February 1914, Page 10

IN HOSPITAL

SURGEON'S GRAVE CHARGES VICTIMS OF EXPERIMENT. Europe's poorer classes are mere raw material for vivisection by surgeons and doctors. No ailing poor man, woman, or child can be put in a doctor's hands without the fear that he or she will be sacrificed to science by being operated on for some non-existent complaint, or inoculated purposely with some hideous and even fatal disease. So, at least, declares Professor Paul Faerster, of Berlin, and he is backed up by the Austrian doctor, Acken. Particularly is that so in university and municipal hospitals and clinics, in maternity homes and in foundling hospitals. This is no mere accusation of anti-vivisection zealots. The vivisectors confess it themselves.' Their medical journals and their books show that all ..over Europe poor patients, without themselves suspecting it, are being tortured and ruined in health in ofder to increase the sum of medical and surgical knowledge. Transferring cancer, infecting with bubonic plague, injection of tho smallpox virus, dangerous experiments with tho heart, wholesale injection of tuberculosis cultures, tho artificial production of hideous diseases, and operations for ailments which do not exist, are only a few of the ways in which the poor in Europe's hospitals are victimised. MEDICAL CURIOSITY. _ Dr. Acken says that a large proportion of operations in hospitals of Central Europe are "undertaken merely to satisfy medical curiosity." He divides these experiments into three classes — operations on patients who need no operations at all ; necessary operations, which, however, are pu&hed for experimental reasons farther than they should be, and in which healing is artificially delayed, and finally, cases where the necessary operations aro not carried Out because the human vivisectors, in order to solve doubtful questions of surgery, prefer to undertake unnecessary operations. One of tho great physicians who attended tho late Emperor Frederick is alleged to have practised the experiment of inoculating patients with cancer "to see how it took." Professor Foerster gives names of three eminent doctors who inoculate poor children with smallpox poison, and of others who make dangerous experiments with their patients' hearts. In Berlin a well-known doctor admits haying used bubonic plague cultures obtained from two men who died in London, for the purpose of testing the virus on healthy Men. In this case, he says, tho men agreed to the experiment. But in nearly all cases the patients, who are mostly ignorant men and women, imagine they are being cured.