The Pros and Cons of Vivisection Part 1

The Pros and Cons of Vivisection.

by Charles Richet.

PREFACE

To scientific readers, Professor Charles Richet needs no introduction, but to the public at large it may be necessary to mention that he is one of the best known of French physiologists. He has occupied for a good many years the Chair of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and he has contributed greatly to the progress of the science to which he has devoted his life; some of his discoveries are alluded to with all modesty in the pages which follow. He is, moreover, a man of great erudition, and has been wisely selected to be the editor of a monumental work, _Le dictionnaire de physiologie_, which is issuing from the press to-day.

Professor Richet has given particular attention to the study of the psychological side of physiology, and his views on pain will be read as coming from one who is specially fitted to deal with this and other mental phenomena.

I therefore consider it a great honour that Professor Richet should have asked me to write a preface to his most interesting and convincing book on the Pros and Cons of Vivisection, and it is a great pleasure to me to commend its thoughtful perusal to all who are interested in the subject.

Professor Richet is not only one who speaks with authority, but he is one of the gentlest and kindliest of men. The science which he teaches is the science of life. To understand the meaning of vital processes it is necessary to study the living organism, and to obtain this knowledge it is sometimes necessary to perform experiments on living animals. When he defends a practice which many regard as cruel, detestable, and immoral, mainly because of the unscrupulous misrepresentations put forward by the professional Anti-vivisectionists, he does so because he is convinced that none of the epithets just mentioned correctly describe the experiments which are carried out in physiological laboratories at the present time.

These experiments are undertaken only by properly qualified persons having a due sense of their responsibilities. Every regard is paid to the comfort of the animals employed; and the ultimate aim of this work is the progress of knowledge, and the consequent relief to suffering which is so often only the result of ignorance. The benefits which accrue are felt not only by human beings, but also (as in veterinary practice) by the animals themselves. No attempt is made here to defend experiments which have not these objects in view, or which (as has happened in the past) pay no consideration to the pain an animal experiences.

I feel quite sure that if the British public were convinced that the experiments in our laboratories were all conducted in accordance with our present law, the Anti-vivisection crusade would flicker out. It is the object of those who are active propagandists on the other side to keep their agitation going, by omitting to mention the painlessness of the operations performed, or by suggesting (either directly or by innuendo) that anaesthesia is a sham. My own experience, which is a wide one, has been that physiologists not only obey the law literally, but are most punctilious in its due observance. A certain number of trivial irregularities have been reported to the Home Office by the inspectors appointed under the Vivisection Act, but there has been no case of omitting the use of anaesthetics. The majority of these offences have been for using anaesthetics unnecessarily. A certificate in certain cases is granted for the omission of an anaesthetic: this is given when the operation is a trifling one, and has never been granted for any operation more serious than the p.r.i.c.k of a hypodermic needle. Nevertheless, the operator has sometimes employed an anaesthetic even for this, and has in consequence been reported to the Home Office for infringing the terms of his certificate.

Pawloff has truly said that the ideal experiment is one performed without anaesthesia and without pain. In many cases this ideal can be realised, but in other cases it is unattainable. Physiologists have, therefore, had to select which of the two disturbing factors shall be absent, and they have unhesitatingly chosen the latter. Pain must be absent (1) on grounds of humanity, (2) because it is a far greater disturber of the normal functions than anaesthesia is, and (3) because the struggles of an animal in pain will nullify the accuracy of the experiment, and endanger the safety of the delicate apparatus which it may be necessary to employ.

Exactly the same arguments apply to the employment of the antiseptic or aseptic methods of surgery, in experiments in which the animal is kept alive after an operation to study its effects. The healing process is then painless, and there is absence of those febrile and inflammatory conditions which would otherwise complicate the issue.

It is therefore for two reasons that an experimenter uses both anaesthetics and antiseptics, (1) to save the animal suffering, and (2) to ensure the success of the experiment.

The barbarities which are recorded by Anti-vivisectionist agitators do not exist; the repet.i.tion of their stories in spite of repeated contradictions is partly due to wilful misrepresentation and exaggeration, and partly the result of ignorance of the meaning of the technical terms employed by physiological writers.

At the Royal Commission which is now considering the question of Vivisection, the cases of alleged cruelty have been one by one sifted to the bottom, and in no single case has a charge of cruelty been sustained.

Any one who cares to wade through the four bluebooks of evidence which have been printed will discover for himself that this is so. In fact, one prominent Anti-vivisection journal (the _Verulam Review_, April-June 1907, p. 186), in reference to the evidence given by one of the witnesses before the Commission, had to confess, "Almost every one of Mrs Cook's horrifying cases seems, when examined, to melt away."

An Anti-vivisectionist publication which has obtained some notoriety ("The Shambles of Science") figured in a recent lawsuit. When the particular charge which was the subject of the action was investigated by a prolonged inquiry before the Lord Chief-Justice, a British jury showed their sense of the enormity of the slander by awarding the physiologist impugned the very substantial damages of 2000. An undertaking was subsequently given by the publisher of this "hysterical work" (to quote the words of the Lord Chief-Justice) that it should be withdrawn from publication. Yet the book has been since re-issued by the authors, with the chapter that formed the subject of the trial omitted, but otherwise with very little alteration.

The libellous statements scattered through its other chapters can still be read by the lovers of sensation, and the authors doubtless hope that their readers will never take the trouble to read also the evidence before the Royal Commission in which all the allegations of cruelty have been shown to be groundless.

The subject of curare, another bugbear of the Anti-vivisection lecturer, is so adequately dealt with by Professor Richet that I will spare the reader any further discussion on that question here. I have taken the liberty of adding, in a footnote on p. 36, a statement in respect to the usages of English physiologists in relation to that drug.

The experiments of the pharmacologist in the investigation of the action of drugs can be and are carried out under anaesthesia in the same way as those of the physiologist. But the experiments of the pathologist, which consist in conveying germs and other disease products to animals, come under a different heading. One does not deny that if the animal takes the disease, suffering is produced. This is fully admitted by Professor Richet, and I think that any common-sense reader will be convinced by the arguments put forward that the practice is fully justifiable. It is difficult, as Professor Richet points out, to gauge the amount of pain an animal such as a rat, guinea-pig, or rabbit (the animals usually employed for the purpose) really feels when given a disease experimentally, and whether this is greater or less than the suffering it will endure when another disease or a violent death carries it off in the usual course of nature. It is, however, undeniable that the suffering of these animals is much less than those of human beings. A man, when he is ill, suffers a certain amount of discomfort and physical bodily pain; but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the mental worry and anxiety he endures--all that, at any rate, is absent from the suffering rabbit. The pathologist sees beyond the pain which he inflicts to the pain which he prevents. The death of a few lower animals may be, and has in the past been the means of preventing pain and disease both to the animals themselves and to human beings also, who may be counted by thousands or even millions.

If there is one piece of evidence more than another which was given before the Royal Commission that deserves rescue from the oblivion of a bluebook, it is that given by Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton. His is one of the keenest legal intellects of modern times, and he at any rate cannot be accused of having any axe of his own to grind. I regret that exigencies of s.p.a.ce prevent me from making more than one or two references to it.

He begins by taking the case of a s.h.i.+p infected with plague, and infested also with rats, the carriers of plague. The s.h.i.+p enters port. Would it be preferable to kill the rats, and so prevent them and the disease from entering the port and causing untold disaster there, or staying one's hand because the slaughter of the rats would be a painful proceeding? The captain who gives orders for the destruction of the rats inflicts pain and death on them in order to prevent greater pain and more widespread death elsewhere. The captain who says, "Spare the rats," is guilty of the criminal act of causing the death of many innocent human beings. So it is with the Anti-vivisectionists: they see only the pain inflicted, and do not heed the pain prevented. On this score they are in a sense logical when they call Lord Lister a brute, although he of all men living at the present time has been the means of preventing the greatest amount of suffering.

They see only the pain which he deliberately inflicted on a few rats and rabbits; they cannot see, or refuse to see the measureless amount of misery he has prevented.

In another place the Lord Justice points out that the pain inflicted in all the laboratories of the country put together during a year is infinitesimal compared to that which is inflicted every day in the slaughter of animals for food; to that which ignorant farm labourers inflict without anaesthetics, in spaying animals by thousands in order that beef and mutton may be tenderer or have a more pleasant flavour to the consumer; to that inflicted by sportsmen when their victims, imperfectly shot, die a lingering death; to that which women thoughtlessly allow in order that they may have ospreys in their hats and furs upon their backs.

So far as the satisfaction of appet.i.te, the pandering to the so-called sportsman's instincts, or the gratification of vanity are concerned, these things may go on. The average Anti-vivisectionist disregards them, or at least makes no effort to prevent them. The only kind of pain which stirs his feelings, and meets with his opprobrium, and enables him to indulge in his favourite epithets, is _the one justifiable bit of pain in the whole world_--a pain inflicted with the n.o.blest of all objects, and by the most humane of all men (for so the medical profession admittedly is), the object, namely, of preventing future pain, which otherwise would encompa.s.s the world of life.

Professor Richet has wisely not made his book too long. He has been content to select a few typical and striking examples of the benefits which experimentation on animals has conferred upon humanity, instead of attempting even to enumerate them all. He might for instance have dwelt upon the extinction of rinderpest in South Africa: here, at the expense of a few experimental animals, Koch has prevented a scourge which formerly exterminated hundreds of thousands of cattle annually, and might still be exercising this fell influence on to all eternity if the opponents of scientific knowledge had their way. He might have taken the case of snake bite, and the discovery made by his great fellow-countryman Calmette of the means of combating this deadly poison, which has. .h.i.therto killed our Indian fellow-subjects by its tens of thousands a year.

On coming to one of the most recent of beneficent discoveries, he might have dwelt upon the case of Mediterranean fever, and the way which it has been practically stamped out at Malta and Gibraltar, because the method of its spread has been discovered and the disease prevented at the expense of a few goats and other animals.

But those who are wilfully deaf to such arguments will not, I fear, be convinced, even if examples are multiplied indefinitely. In spite of the love for animals which our opponents profess, the life of cattle, particularly if they are so far away as South Africa, does not appeal to them. The happiness of the teeming millions of India does not come home to them. Even the comfort of our brave soldiers and sailors in the Mediterranean stations is of little account: they have never visited the hospitals at Malta or Gibraltar, and seen, as they could have seen a year or two ago, the poor fellows dying off like flies from a mysterious disease that nothing could be done for, because the manner in which the fatal germ entered their bodies was unknown. Now, by the simple prohibition of the use of goat's milk, a prohibition due to animal experimentation and to that alone, the disease has been exterminated.

Anti-vivisectionists do not come in contact with disease all day and every day as medical men do; they therefore do not realise how widespread it is, and what terrible forms it may take. Their notions are vague; they talk about suffering without any intimate knowledge of the question. They bestow their sympathies upon the few victims of the vivisector's knife or syringe; they have none left for the larger number of victims which would have suffered if the few had not been sacrificed. Can it be wondered at that medical men, whose experience is so different to theirs, feel otherwise?

The doctor's life is not one in which these are just a few painful partings with dear ones, but he is steeped in such experiences from morning till night. His sympathies aim at the relief and cure of all this evil; and the death of a few guinea-pigs or rabbits is a necessary incident which he has the courage to permit because of the greater good that is the ultimate result.

There are, however, some of the examples which ought to stir better feelings even in the Anti-vivisectionist camp, namely, cases of diseases which are common or used to be common in our very midst, and which we need not go to India or Malta to look for. One of these is diphtheria, and the statements and statistics in relation to the almost miraculous change which has come over our ideas on this affection are incontrovertible, and are fully set forth in the following pages. The disease no longer inspires the terror it used to do, for it is one which can be cured, and easily cured, by the method of serum therapy. It has not, it is true, been stamped out, for up till the present success has not attended efforts of prevention.

Prevention is better than cure, but cure is better than suffering and death. Just now, medical science can cure the disease, and if medical progress continues at its present rapid rate of growth, who can doubt that in the near future this disease, like typhus and typhoid, will be stamped out?

Typhoid fever is an example of a disease which has only died out in this country quite recently. When I was a student the hospital wards were full of it; but to-day most medical students in London pa.s.s through their entire curriculum of five years or more without ever seeing a case. What has been accomplished for London can also be carried out in other large cities, and the extinction of the disease is entirely due to improved sanitary measures, and the destruction of the bacillus which causes the malady. We often quite legitimately complain of the extravagances of our Government departments and our County Councils, and of their apathy in questions affecting the health of the country. We are still awaiting, for instance, proper legislative measures to ensure the purity of milk. But this at least we can thank them for--proper methods of disinfection and a purer water-supply have led to the almost complete extinction of what was a common and painful and fatal disease. But how does Vivisection come in here? County councillors are not Vivisectors. No, they are not, but their action is the undoubted result of public opinion; and that healthy public opinion is the outcome of medical opinion, which was preached to deaf ears for many years, and at last succeeded in impressing itself upon the public at large; and this medical knowledge was the offspring of the only certain guide in such matters, pathological experiment. It was not until the germ of typhoid fever was recognised and isolated, not until the conditions of its growth and the means of its destruction were experimentally verified upon the lower animals, that any sound knowledge was obtained. Bacteriology is at the bottom of hygiene; it is by hygienic precautions that certain diseases are prevented; and the basis of bacteriology is experiment on animals.

I will allow myself only one more point, and that relates to the general question of serum therapy. Some people object to the whole conception of serum treatment, on the ground that serum and allied substances are 'messy'

things. It was by this very expressive phrase that Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton summarised and paraphrased the Anti-vivisectionist att.i.tude on the serum method of treatment. Miss Lind af Hageby on one occasion characterised it as 'medieval,' a word which is quite meaningless in this connection, but prettier, I admit, than "Behring's filth product," which is the elegant name coined for antidiphtheritic serum by one of her friends.

Filth or dirt has been well defined as matter in the wrong place. Blood on a carpet, for example, is certainly messy and dirty; it ought not to be there. But blood or serum (the fluid part of the blood) in the heart, or in the arteries and veins, is in its rightful place, and it does its duty of nutrition and so forth when it comes into more immediate contact with the tissues in the small tubes we call the capillaries. One of these duties is to exert a protective influence upon the whole body, by destroying the germs of disease which get in, despite all precautions. We are all of us exposed, so long as spitting in public places is not prohibited, to the germs of consumption, but we do not all die of that disease. This is because the white corpuscles of our blood are in good trim, and able successfully to devour the bacteria that enter our interior. It is those people who are run down, and in whom the white corpuscles are 'below par,'

that catch the disease. In a.s.sisting the white corpuscles to perform this important function, the co-operation of certain substances dissolved in the fluid portion of the blood is also necessary. The most recently discovered of these auxiliary substances are called _opsonins_. The word opsonin is derived from a Greek root which means "to prepare the feast." The opsonin either adds something to the bacterium which makes it tasty to the white corpuscle, or removes (or neutralises) something which previously made it distasteful. White corpuscles will not as a rule ingest and devour bacteria from a pure culture, but they do so eagerly immediately the bacteria are bathed in serum; and the serum which is most efficacious in acting as a sort of sauce is that which has been obtained from an animal which has been previously infected with the same kind of bacteria, and which has recovered from the ailment such bacteria have set up.

This is not mere fancy: the whole sequence of events can be easily followed on a gla.s.s slide kept at body temperature and examined with a microscope.

It is well known that if the yeast plant (which is very similar in many details to bacteria) is grown in a solution of sugar, the sugar is broken up and disappears, and two new substances formed from the sugar take its place. These are alcohol and carbonic acid gas. If bacteria grow in the blood, they do not produce alcohol, but they do produce other poisons in a way a.n.a.logous to that by which yeast produces alcohol. These poisons are called _toxins_. There are substances in the fluid part of the blood which are called ant.i.toxins, because they neutralise the toxins produced by the bacteria. Their presence const.i.tutes a means of defence against the harmful effects the toxins would otherwise produce. The marvellous part of the defence is that, although we all have a certain amount of ant.i.toxin in our blood, the amount increases in proportion to the amount of toxin. It is a familiar fact that rough manual labour increases the hardness of the hands; friction stimulates the epidermis or outer skin, so that it grows in thickness. The body affords numerous similar instances of how it is capable of rising to the occasion and increasing its defences. Just in the same way, the presence of a toxin stimulates the living cells to produce more and more ant.i.toxin, and the blood remains rich in the ant.i.toxin for a considerable time afterwards. This explains why a person who has had an infectious disease does not take it readily a second time; he is immune for a certain number of years, because his blood is so rich in the antidote.

Now, the principle of serum treatment depends on those ascertained and definitely proved facts. In the modern treatment of tuberculosis, for example, the aim of the physician is to increase nature's method of cure: good food and pure air do much to increase the healthiness of the blood and fortify its natural power, of destroying the germs; sometimes this alone suffices. At other times it is not sufficient, particularly if the disease has advanced and the number of bacteria is too great for the enfeebled white corpuscles to deal with. Then the physician goes a step farther, and administers the appropriate opsonin by injecting it under the skin, again simply increasing the resistance of his patient by a perfectly natural method.

In the case of diphtheria, the ant.i.toxin appears to be more efficacious than an opsonin. A horse is inoculated with diphtheria, and when he has recovered, his blood is collected. This blood is then rich in ant.i.toxin, the natural antidote that has enabled the horse to get well again. The blood is allowed to clot, and the clot is removed; the fluid residue is called serum, and the serum contains the antidote. If now another horse has diphtheria, and you want to cure him quickly, what more natural than inject the serum of the horse who has just recovered? it will save the second horse the trouble and the time of making the ant.i.toxin for himself, and it has been proved over and over again that the second horse does recover with amazing celerity.

The pathologists then advanced a step, and asked, Why should this antidote be used solely for animals when they have diphtheria? Why should not the horse's serum be beneficial to human beings when they are attacked with the same disease? The diphtheria poison is much more harmful to a man, and kills him more quickly than it does a horse; it is therefore imperative to use the antidote early. The crucial experiment was made; entire success followed it, and now, as Professor Richet says, it is the only treatment employed, and any medical man who refuses to use it is little short of a criminal.

I have entered into this brief and, I trust, simple explanation of serum treatment, because so many people want to understand it and are unable to comprehend the technical terms which scientific men, writing for scientific readers, almost exclusively employ. I am even hopeful that some of the more reasonable opponents of animal experimentation may be convinced that by carrying out the new methods of serum therapy, we are not going against nature but helping her. It is just these 'messy things' that nature uses for curing infectious diseases, and the introduction of an opsonin or an ant.i.toxin is not putting matter in its wrong place, but in its right place; and therefore the use of the terms filth and dirt in this relations.h.i.+p should be confined either to the foul-mouthed or to the ignorant.

W. D. HALLIBURTON.

_July 1908._

P.S.--The proof sheets of Professor Richet's book have pa.s.sed through my hands during their issue from the press. Beyond a few verbal amendments, and a footnote here and there which I have added and initialled, no alterations have been made in the original.

I am also responsible for the insertion of Appendix C, regarding the aims and objects of the Research Defence Society. These additions and minor alterations have all met with Professor Richet's approval.

I may mention that the book has not yet been published in French, and is presented to the public for the first time in English dress. The English lady who collaborated with Professor Richet in its production has worked with and studied under him for some years, and it was largely owing to her persuasion that he consented to express his views publicly. She desires for the present to remain anonymous.

W. D. H.

_October 1908._

INTRODUCTION