Grey River Argus and Backball News

Grey River Argus, 2 July 1914, Page 4

Grey River Argus and Backball News

Dolirerad orery morning in Graymouth. Kumara, Hokitika, r-^non, Wall«end, Taylor, TiUa, Btuuaertou, StLlw iter. Ngahere, Blackball, Nelson Creek, Aliaura, Ikamatua, Waiuta, Beeftou, Crouodun, Bunauga, Punollie, Cob Jen, Baxter's, Kokiii, Patara, Kaimata, Aratika, Kotuku, Moana, Butu, Te Kinga, Botomanu* Foaroa, I bonnia, Jaokionu and Utnat '■

THURSDAY, JULY 2nd., 1914

The crusade against vivisection semes to break out at intermittent periods, and the statments made by the anti-vivisectionists are such as are calculated to shock or exasperate medical circles/ where it is held most positively that vaccination, inoculation, the use of serums, anti-toxins and vivisectional experimentation on dumb animals have resulted in great benefits to suffering humanity. It has been alleged by members of anti-vivisection societies that none of the works of vivisectibnists has conferred a single benefit, or led to a discovery of practical benefit to mankind. They state that scores of dogs are slaughtered in laboratories of medical colleges for no

other than a grandstand exhibition, with no beneficial results to medical science,- and that it is necessary to open the doors of all vivisection laboratories. The officer of a humane society recently made the gruesome report that in a certain hospital that he was acquainted with children were in : oculated with serums of loathsome diseases by experimenters, and that dangerous tests were often performed on healthy and ignorant people. He said that one physician had acknowledged in the recent issue of a medical journal that he had sprayed the poison of smallpox, scarlet fever and diphtheria into the lungs and throat of 17 healthy people whom' he was treating, as they supposed, for catarrh of the throat. Anti-viviseetionists are' generally regarded as cranks by those opposed to them, but we must remember that the late Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian age, was opposed to vivisection. In 1910, he published his re- ■ markable work 1 , entitled "The Work lof Life." In Chapter XIX., Wallace declared: "The moral argument against vivisection remains, whether the animals suffer as much as we do, or only half as much. The bad effect on the operator and on the student and spectators remains; the undoubted fact that the practice tends to produce a callousness and a passion for experiment, which leads to unauthorised experiments in hospitals on unprotected patients remains; the horrible callousness of binding the sufferers to the operating trough, so that they cannot express their pain by sound or motion, remains; their treatment, after the experiment, by care^ less attendants, brutalised by custom, remains; the argument of the uselessness of a large proportion of the experiments repeated again and agai/i on scores and hundreds of animals, to confirm or refute the work of other vivisectors, remains; ■; and, finally, the iniquity of its use to demonstrate already established facts to physiological students in hundreds of colleges and schools all over the world remains. I myself am thankful to be able to believe that even the highest animals below ourselves do not feel as acutely as we do; but the fact does not in any way remove my< fundamental disgust at vivisection as being brutalising and immoral." In September, 1905, Wallace wrote to Dr. Walter E. Hadwen, leader of the English antivivisection movement, a letter made, public at the time, in Which the great scientist said; "I have for years come to the conclusion that nothing but total aboliiton will meet the case of vivisection. lam quite disgusted at the frequency of the most horrible experiments to determine the most trivial facts recorded in the publications of scientific societies month by month, evidently car ied on for the interest of research, and the reputation it gives."