VIVISECTION.

Evening Star, Issue 12943, 5 May 1908, Page 5

VIVISECTION.

THAT “BROWN DOG.” A Blue Book recently issued contains the minutes of the evidence of several important witnesses called before the Royal Commission on Vivisection during the last three months of 1907. Professor W. Osier, Regins Professor of Medicine at Oxford, said it was, a very difficult thing Jo teach young men operatire surgery. Ihe usual way was to operate on a dead body. That was all very well in certain directions. It taught the man, perhaps, how tn make a nice stump of a limb, but he missed a great deal. He was not taught technique, and it was impossible almost to teach properly the finer operations in the abdomen. And so operations had to be performed on animals. Ho did not think anyone could '• isit such a place as the Hunterian Laboratory and see the way in which the class is conducted there without feeling that there was just the same care taken of the animal as of a human being, both prior and subsequent to the operation. Personally ho felt that the matter could be hit safely in the hands of the men w<o were in charge of the physiological laboratories and the scientific men of the country. Mr Johiq Hughes, secretary of the National Canine Defence League, said the society s point was that the difference between human and canine organs was so great that all experiments on dogs were useless for the purpose of understanding the human organism. Sir Frederick Banbury was asked if ho could speak regarding' the “ Battersea Brown Dog.” Sir Frederick said that the evidence at the trial, to the best of lb; iecollection, was that there were three operations upon the brown dog. The first took place some two or three weeks or a month before the second. At the end of the second operation the dog v-as handed over to another operator, and the operator who performed the first operation emitted the building, leaving the dog in the hands ot the operator for the third operation. • ir George Kekewich, hon. secretary to the Parliamentary Association for the Abolitiuon of Vivisection, said the Association advocated the auolition of experiments on animals on the ground that they regarded them as inhuman, immoral, degrading, and a disgrace to civilisation, "and, further, that they were practically unproductive of any beneficial result' to the human race.