IN HOSPITAL.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3584, 9 March 1914, Page 7

IN HOSPITAL.

SURGEON’S GRAVE CHARGES,

VICTIMS 0> Iv'IPERIMENT. Europe’s poorer classes are mere raw material for .vivisection by surgeons and doctors. No ailing poor man, woman, or child oan be put in a doctor’s liands without tho fear that he or site will be sacrificed to science by being operated on for some non-exist-ent complaint, or inoculated purposely with i some hideous and even fatal disease. So, at least, declares Professor Paul Foefster, of Berlin, and he is backed up by the Austrian doctor, Acken. Particularly is tliat go 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 (hem-elv—. Their medical journals and their books show tint all over Europe poor ; * : nits, without themselves suspecting i-., are being tortured and ruined in ehaltfi < order to increase the sum of medical and surgical knowledge. Transferring cancer, infecting with bubonic plague, injection of the smallpox virus, dangerous experiments with the heart, wholesalo injection of tuberculosis cultures, the artificial production of hideous diseases, and opeartions for ailments that do not exist, arc only a few of lie ways in which lie poor in Europe’s hospitals are victimised.

MEDICAL CURIOSITY. Dr Acken saj's that a large propo-r tion of operations in hospital., of Central Europe are “undertaken merely to satisfy medical curiosity,” He divides these operations into threo classes —operations on jwUients who need no operations at all; necessary operations, which, however, are pushed for experimental reasons farther than they should be, and in which healing is artificially delayed, and finally, cases where the necessary operations are not carried out because the human viviseetors, in order to solve doubtful questions of surgery, prefer to undertake unnecessary operations. One of the great physicians who attended the Late Emperor Frederick is alleged to have practised the experiment of inoculating patients with cancer “to see how it took.” Professor Foerster gives the 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-know doctor admits having 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, the men agreed to the experiment.’ But in nearly all cases the patients, who are mostly ignorant men and women, imagine they are being cured.