A VINDICATION OF VIVISECTION

Otago Witness, Issue 2569, 10 June 1903, Page 68

A VINDICATION OF VIVISEC TION

LXPFJUMENTS ON ANIMALS. By Sh.imita- Paget, F.R.C.S. I With an Introduction by Lord Lister. I New and Revised Edition. j (The Progressive Science Series.) London : John Murray. Dunedin : RJ. Staik and Co. 7s 6d. (REVIEWrD BY DIXORNIS.) Anti-vivisection is always a craze somei where, but one whose voice has not been heard very loudly of late. The only exception of which I am aware is to be found in Germany, •where some recent stir of the kind has been caused by the private performance of a play called "The Vivisector." This drama, is described as being an extremely sensational affair — the wildly realistic production of a tyro in stage-craft, but an adept in controversy. I only mention it here because of the characteristic expression it elicited from the omniscient Kaiser when, along with a select dozen of his favourite officers, he "sat in a darkened auditorium and listened to this most extraordinary drama." The Kaiser, who is described as having ''joked and laughed" all through ■ the piece, aiose at its conclusion, and, with 1 a half shudder, said, "It s houible! Can science justify it?" This, coming from a man who has found delight in the battues of birds and beasts, w"ho has shot hundreds of boars and stags driven to him by beaters, is correctly described as one of the most extraordinary , expressions to which he has ever given utterance. That the Kaiser is "an enthusiastic sportsman,"' and at the same time "a great lover of animals," may be reconcilable ; statement", only I confess myself unable to sco it. In past years I have noted many <,ible messages informing us of the huge "bags" of butchered birds and beasts falling jto the Kaiser's gun. Among royalties Wil- ', Ham's fame in this way is not by any means singular in kind, but his keen desire to beat all existing records in the matter of "bags" has often been published abroad. His startling expression of opinion on vivi- , section sepms to fit in but ill with his i jealously-cherished reputation as a sportsman who would lead, but not be led ; who may "love animals," but who at any cost must have a superabundance of them to massacre. At anyrata, Emperor William Ims announced his intention of looking into the matter of ••ivis; 3 ction within the Fatherland, and possibly some of the developments may take the form of reminders such as he may find not at all pleasant. The Kai°er's attitude in the matter so far is reminiscent of that of many anti-vivis.ee-tiomsts. They tak j , "It is horrible" for j the text of per fervid harangues to audiences of faddists in London, and ne.xfc day they ' are down in the couiury. bloz.ng away at ! poor harmless grou«e and partridges that could not defend themselves ivim a poodle dog, and shooting silly., house-fed pheasants I winch have to be sho'o-ed away from the j ' gun bands. This is the anti-vivisectionist ! \ of the fa-shion set by such "spoits" as Sir I Wilfud Lawson and others, although I ad- , nut there are some who are more consistent jif little less eccentric. These are the lady I anti-vivisectionists — those who won't eat eggs or use milk even because of the injustice to cows and hens involved in getting from them these wholesome and delec- | table comestible*. They .ire vegetarian to a. woni in, and I lespecfc them, faddists though they be, far more than the lighthearted individu il who nreaehe.s humanity in town and slaughters harmless birds for his amusement in the country Mr Paget's. book is at once a history and a defence of the practice of vivisection, or the making of experiments on living animals. As a hi.stoiy it should piove invaluable to live and progressive medical men, using that teim in a wide f?nse, as well as extremely interesting to readers among the general public As a defence, it will, I consider, be found unassailable. But the author does not waste space or tire his re.ulcis by the inclusion of contioviisul matter. The Gist edi'ion, he say*-, "c.on-taint-d leferences. to a few of the innumerable false .statements that arc mids by the 'anti-iivi«ection' .societies. These refeienee<? have now been dehted ; for tht^e societies, quarrelling one with another, appealing for fund', and unable to show any leal results for all the vd^t --urns of money that have been was'ed on them, are best left to themselves 'ihey ha\e no common policy, no appreciable influence either on the Home Office or in Paili.imcnt, oi on science or on pncticc; and they aie going the quickest way to lose their hold on the public attention. They hive failed to accomplish anything important, either good or bad ; and thue is no need here to consider why they have f-nled." His Look, then, is entnely de\oted to the hi c tori. al exposition of a "subject that admittedly ha-, its difficulties-. A« Lcrd Lifter says in his Intioduction : "This woik by Mr P.tget is entnely a labour of love. Not being hrni- ! self engaged in loseaiches- involving experiments upon the lower animal*., he is not • directly interested in the :übject. But in his official capacity as secretary to the Assoc»,iti<.n 1 r tin' AuranLsmenl oi Medieme by Research, he has become widely conversant with such investigations, and has been deeply impressed with the greatness of the benefits which they have conferred upon ' mankind and the grievous mistake that is made by those who desire to suppress them. . . . The action of those well-meaning 1 persons is based urion ignorance. They

allow that man is permitted to inflict pairt upon the lower animals when some substantial advantage is to be gained ; but they deny that any good has ever resulted! from the researches which iluy condemn." How far such statements ars from the truth, lie says, will be evident to those who peruse this book.

By dealing with his subject from a purely historical point of view, Mr Paget has taken the best course possible. The first part of the work is devoted to physnlogy, which, as Lord Lifter says, is "the main basis of all sound medicine and surgery. The examples given in this department are not numerous; they are, however, sufficiently striking as indications that, from the discovery of the circulation, of the blood onwards our knowledge of healthy animal function has bee i mainly derived from experiments on animals."' From facts quoted we are reminded that experiments on living animals are far fiom being of recent origin as a mians of medical research. Towards the middle of the second century of our era, Galen proved by such experiments that the brain is as warm as the heart, against the Aristotelian doctrine that the office of the brain is to keep the heart cool. By an expenment of the like kind he proved, also, that' the arteries contain blood, refuting thus the then prevalent fanciful notion that the arterial vessels cont-ained the "breath of life." "Ourselves, having tieel the exposed arteries above and below, opened them between the ligatures, «iicl showed, that they were indeed full of blood," nrc the simple woids in which, he alludes to this experiment. Galen's method was the right one, but, unfortunately, it was not used by his successors. For many centuries after his time "men were content to worship his naup and his doctrines, and forsook his method."

These unworthy disciples did not follow the way of experiment, and did nothing but invent theories that w,ere no help either in science or in practice. From the time of italtn to the time of the Renaissance physiology remained almost whe^-e he had left it. For much more than a thousand! yeare all and sundry of those^ who called him master did nothing that 'would have been commended, but much that would have been condemned, by Galen. When, finally, the intellect of Europe threw off the obscuring cowl of leverence for tradition and authority that for so long had blinded its vision, <■>, few investigators took up the work of physiological research where G.ilc:i had left it. But restrictions were still many, and progress correspondingly slow. Of the men of the Renaissance, Servetus, Caesalpinu", Ruinius, and others, Harvey's near predecessors, " this much only need be said here, that thsy did nob discover the circulation of the blocd." A little later one or two made some approach, to this impoitant discovery, and quotations are given fully showing this. The valves of the veins had been observed by several anatomists of note, and Fabricius a.b Aquapendsnte, Harvey's master at Padua, in hi 3 work, '"De Venarum Ostiolis," showed that ho had studied them so well that " in, anatomy he left nothing more to be said about them ;" but he failed to discern their true function. He he!d that tihey were designed "to retard the blood in some measure lest it should run pell-mell into tho feet, hinds, and fingers, there to be impacted," and so on. "Men had no idea of the rapidity and volume of the circulation; they thought of a port of Stygian tide, oozing this way or that way in the ve^cK — Caesalpinus was of opinion that ib went one way in the day time and another at night ; nor did they see that the pulmonary circulation and the general circulation are one system, the same blood covering the whole course. The work that they did in anatomy was magnificent. Vesalius and the other gicat .anatomists of h's time aje unsurpassed. But phjs>:ology had been hindered for ages by fantastic imaginings, and the facts of the circulation of the blood were almost as far fioai th»ir interpretation in the sixteenth century as they had been, in the time of Galen." Fragmentary though it be, the matter quoted above will, perhaps, give a sufficient idea, of the state of medical science when Harvey entered upon his labours in that field. Born in 1578, his great work on the movement of the heart and blood was published at FrankfuiL in 1628, and I cannot do better than quote the words in winch he gave an account of how 'lie came by his gioat discovery. - They ai.j as follows.- — "When by many dissections of living animals, as they e;>me to hind, I fus-fc gave my.selt' to observing ho'v 1 might discover with my own eyes, ai,d not. fiom books and the writing": of other men, the u«e and puip'jse of the movement of the heart ia> animal-, forthwith 7 found the matter hard indeed, and full of difficulty: so that I began to think, with Frascaloiuis, that the muvemont of the heart was known to God alone. ... At last, having daily used greater disquisition and diligence, by frequent fxunination of mai;v ,md various living animals . . and many observations put together, I came to believe that J had succeeded, and had escaped out of this labyrinth, and therewith had discovered what I doMred, lh<> movement and use of the heart .uid the arteries. And fiom that time, not only to my friends, but also in public in my anatomical lectuies, after the manner of the Academy, I did not fear to set forth my opinion in this mittrr."' He had feared to foimul.tte a knowledge of his discovery, for elsewhere ho say*, "I not only, fe.u- harm from tht. envy of crtam men, but am afiaid lest I mike all men my, enemies," and this was because his discovery could not but be fatal to doehines deeply mooted in the minds of his contemporaries 1 , and revered for thoir antiquity. Of this he says, "Be that as it may, the die is cast now: v>y hope is :n the kvc of truth and the candour of learned minds." It is plain, Mr Paget says, from Harvey's own words:, that he gives to experiments on animals a prominent pi ice among his methods of work Many other passages are quoted -wherein H.trvey insists upon the imfierative need for "freque.it dissections of iving animals, and much use of our own eyes," as the chief means of ca taming taj

correct knowledge of life functions in man. Like many another thoughtful observer, Harvey generalised upon ascertained facts to a certain extent. He thus "imagined" tnat the blood made a complete and regular circuit of the body, testing Ms theory by subsequent investigations upon living animals until he proved conclusively, and for all time, that his idea was correct. He was the first to rightly describe the function of the valves in the veins, and, indeed, from observing that those valves w«re so placed that they gave free passage of the blood towards the heart, and opposed its passage the contrary way, sprang his great discovery of the circulation of the blood. How the arterial blood passed from the arteries into the veins was not clearly known in Harvey's time. Some few years after his death, in 1657, Malpighi, a famous professor of medicine at Bologna, grappled •with this problem, and, after many futile experiments, some of them on dead animals, •solved it. With a microscope of two lenses he examined the lung and mesentery of a living frog, saw the capillaries and the blojd in them, and described wha: he saw tersely and lucidly : "Such is the divarication of these little vessels coming off from the vein and the artery that the order in which the vessel ramifies is no longer preserved, but it looks like a network woven from the offshoots of both vessels." Like almost all previous and subsequent discoveries of importance, this also was due to experiments on living animals. Did space permit. I would be pleased to linger over the remarkable achievements of Stephen Hales, who was rector of Farringdon, Hampshire, and minister of Teddington, Middlesex ; a Doctor of DivinHv and a Fellow of the Royal Society. "His experiments, in the ; r width and diversity, ■were not .surpassed even by those of Jehu Hanler, and were extended far over physiology, vegetable physiology, organic and inorganic chemistry, and pby&ics." Hales was one of England's many great men whose names an: now but seldom mentioned. His labours were truly prodigious in amount nncl of surprisingly high quality in kind. He was the first to mike truly scientific investigations upon the subject of blood pressure, and experiment-el largely on living anunalb — mares, horses, dogs d< er, etc.

After Hales came John H<mi^r, w ho was five \cars old when H\le'-"s 'Statical Essays" were published. Hunter's expeiiments were mostly concerned with the properties, not with the course, of the blond: but s^me of his gi'rat achievements in surgery were intimately dependent on knowledge gained f;om experiments on living animals. From an expeiiment made by him on the antler jf a deer in Richmond Park came the discovery of tho "collateral circulation," knowledge of wh'ch in surgical practice has done away wi'h the previouslyexisting necessity for innumerable amputations.

As it was with th? main and subsidiary problems of ths circiilnlion, so it has been, with every otlu-r part of the physiological field. Those who hold that such nutters could have been elucidated by examination f d^d animals will find themselves fiimly rebuked in this able vindication. As one instance, suggestive in the extreme, t.ike the -treatment of myxcedema, a disease worse than death, and which only a few decades since still proved an utterly baffling mystery to medical practice and .science alike. Even as late as 1832-83 "things stood at this pomt — that the removal of a difeafd thyroid gland had been followed in some cases by a train of symptoms such as Sir William' Gull had recorded in 1875. Would the same symptoms follow removal of the healthy gland? The answer was given by Sir Victor Horsley's experiments, begun in 1884. Ho was able, by removal of the gland, to produce in monkeys a chronic myxecdema, a cretinoid state, the fat-simile of the disease in man." He made it plain that all the horrors of myxoedema — the derangement of functions, the coarsening of tissues, the dulling of th? wits, and the gradual drift into hopeless imbecility — were due to the wasting of a wie-tch'd little gland — "a disused reproductive or^an of oui invertebrate ancestor*," as it li.v beon described, and which lies close to the larynx, and is of very little apparent me. In England, Sir V. Horsley was the first to fiiggest tl.at tb.yroid-tis.sue from an aiumai ji.st lc!l o d should be transplanted beneath the ikin of a lnvxcedematous pa'aent. Continental investigators had attained to some success •with similar procedure, b'tt the results, up to a dozen years since, were still dfpress.ng. Since then triumph has come, r.nd r>rw this frightful disease is quit 2 readily curable by means of "tabloids." Not only so. but "the same treatment has given good results in countless ca c es of sporadic ciitinism. restoring growth of bo'lv and of mind to chi'dren that were hopelessly imbecile."

And, as Mr Paget says, "myxecdema is but one instance how the treatment of disease must have the help of experiments on animals. Those who oppos." all such experinvntf, now that they have faced, or out-far-w], thf- f;»i-tt! about myxTdema. must face the fa'-t« ah'iuf ran-pr What do they v.'i r h tfi ."-pe flnn*'' *I Ji«-v 'ire ;d»so!i!tely ignorant of the elpnv-nt >rv f.i'ts ibnut the disease: will they ad\nc the exptjts what lines to follow?'

I have only touched the subject here and there. The chantT* devoted to 'Hip Growth of Bone, The Ncivous System, Gheogen, Anthrax, Tubercle, Diphrherii. Tetanas, Rabies, Plague. Choleis, r.i'a«Hic Dieeases, Fevers, Snake Venom, The Action of Drugs, etc., etc.. abound with information that will prove a revelation to many of the vast benefits springing from knowledge gained from experiments on living animals. The act relating to snch experiments is given in full as an appendix.

Let anyone try to imsgino what the rolume of bacteriological eciencc would have looked like at the present day without the resort to such experiments, and a partial idea will be gained of their entire necessity and f.<r-repchm!j importance in the combat with disease. Mr Paget's book should be in the hands of every medical practitioner, •while a knowledge of its contents to members of the geneial public could haidly he over-estimated.