Elizabeth Blackwell

“ We cannot destroy the instinct of private property, but we can guide and limit it. We cannot change structure, but we can educate it; nor abolish curiosity, but we can restrain and direct it; nor check invention, but it need not be applied to evil purposes. Neither can we make races equal, but we can establish justice and mercy in the relations of the stronger to the weaker.
This study of the natural laws, which necessarily limit rational human action, applies with especial force to biological research, and explains the reason for limiting scientific method. ”

“ In the opinion of an increasing number of intelligent physicians, a vast amount of what is now presumptuously called research—experiments disguised under learned names, but which are really the irrational mutilating and diseasing of sentient living creatures—are no more scientific research than is the gratification of a child's curiosity when it sticks a pin, with a thread, through a cockchafer, to see how long it will fly and how loud it will buzz. ”

“ It is a short-sighted and hopeless attempt to do violence to Nature in a search for scientific truth. Distinction must be made between the possible and impossible in the conditions under which we are placed in life. Thus, we cannot destroy the family relation, but we can make it happy and conducive to the welfare of the race. We cannot change the method of human generation, but we can spiritualize its exercise. ”

“ But however originating, conscience is a positive and potent fact. It is, indeed, the mightiest factor in social life. It is the great controller of selfhood. It enlarges human character and guides human conduct. The deepening of this principle through the growth of justice and sympathy marks an advancement in the type of humanity. Increasing respect for life is one of the clearest signs of growing conscience. Our reverence for the principle of life grows with our enlarging intellectual perception of its universality and its unlimited power of development. ”

“ So in biological research we see the disastrous effects of individual and national rivalry. They are shown in the contradictory results of false methods of observation, in the endless repetition of similar painful experiments, in the strife of conflicting theories, and in the practical failure of results obtained from the lower animals when applied to the human race.
The moral sense of a noble profession may well be appealed to, to create a conscience which shall check the present grave abuses of so-called research. ”

“ In the slow approach towards truth—which is the great object of science—no single method is indispensable. The human mind is so full of activities; Nature presents such an infinite variety of resources, that progress in research can never be hindered by the choice of right instead of wrong method. ”

“ Truth can only he arrived at by considering various or apparently opposite aspects of human problems; so biological facts, or the problems of organized or living creatures, must be considered, not simply from the side of 'mechanics, physics, and chemistry, or the automatic action of the forces of matter,' but also from the equally positive facts of life, and the forces which careful observation is gradually showing to be enfolded in the fact of mind as developed through protoplasm onward. The facts of affection, companionship, sympathy, justice, are positive forces. ”

“ These are the words of one of our wisest physicians, deliberately written in the full maturity of a life devoted to original research and its practical application to medicine. His experience led him to the recognition of this great truth: that the supreme aim of the medical profession must become more and more the advancement of sanitation. In any comprehensive view of medical art as a science, the cure of disease is rationally secondary to its prevention. ”

“ Our medical schools should turn the force of their learning ability and great influence to the conversion of their students into a vast body of sanitary missionaries. If our thousands of medical graduates turned out every year into practice could go forth inspired with enthusiasm for health, convinced that the preservation of health was their especial work, and that all disease must be regarded as a violation of the laws of health, a violation which it was their special duty to fight against; a mighty step in the advancement of medicine would be taken. ”

“ Again, when the Russian nobleman purchased a child and condemned it to be brought up with a deaf and dumb nurse, under the unnatural condition of deprivation of all social relations, his action was not scientific, but a gratification of inhuman curiosity.
It is within our power apparently to drown an animal, human or brute, and recover it to life again and again, but we gain no scientific knowledge by so doing. We torture the creature and violate our natural instincts, but we acquire no practical benefit to human welfare ”

“ In research the radical difference between inorganic and organic Nature cannot be too clearly insisted on. Whilst in the former we can resolve compounds into their elements, and recombine them, such process is impossible in organic Nature. We can take a steam-engine or a watch to pieces, examine their parts, repair them, and put them together again, thus proving our knowledge in this realm of Nature. But a living thing cannot be treated in the same way. ”

“ This frail-looking woman drifted on to the front, and after the Battle of Gettysburg, donning a pair of man’s boots, wading in pools of blood and mud, spent two days and nights on the field of slaughter, drawing out still-breathing bodies from the heaps of slain, binding up wounds, giving a draught of water, placing a rough pillow under the head, in an unselfish enthusiasm that knew neither hunger nor fatigue. ”

“ Extending experience is more and more clearly showing us, as a practical fact, that whilst observation and rational—i.e., humanely limited — experiment are legitimate and noble efforts for the attainment of improved medicine, cruel and merely curious experiment, condemned by our moral faculties, are misleading and mischievous.
Men like Professor Henschel, of Upsala, and Professor Pettenkofer, of Munich, warn our eager young investigators against drawing conclusions as to human beings from experiments made on animals. ”

“ We have no right, for any purpose whatever, to torture a living creature to death, either by the mutilation of the organs, the slow deprivation of the necessary conditions of life, or the still slower process of destroying by the inoculation of disease. ”

“ Thus, the study of living creatures under unnatural or destructive conditions, although it may be a well-meaning attempt to acquire knowledge, is nevertheless a dangerous one. It is intellectually a false method, which may lead to practical error, and produce a labyrinth of confusion and contradictory experience which hinders the attainment of exact knowledge. It is morally a false method, because it injures those elementary instincts of justice and mercy by whose evolution civilization advances. ”

“ WHEN we investigate the popular or ethical aspect of so-called scientific research, made upon living animals, we are at once met by facts which imperatively demand both serious thought and determined action, if we would not be participators in the degradation of human conscience. ”

“ It is thus seen that methods of biological research which involve cruel or destructive experimentation are both ethically unjustifiable and intellectually fallacious. They are unscientific methods, which will inevitably be abandoned as we attain to clearer views of that unity of truth in which the reconciliation of human conscience with intellectual activity becomes alone recognised as science. ”

“ Such research, reconciling by right methods of investigation intellectual activity with human conscience, would increase our knowledge and advance our well-being in accordance with the higher reason of the race. Only when thus guided by intelligence and conscience can biological research deserve the noble name of science. ”

“ That interesting book, 'The Naturalist in La Plata,' in narrating the author's observation of the natural fearlessness of all wild animals towards man, the careful research into life-habits that can be carried on where this fearlessness is not betrayed, and the susceptibility to kindness which exists amongst all the lower animals to their sovereign, man, furnishes a striking and delightful suggestion as to the method which future research should take. ”

“ Such demonstration is a thrilling spectacle to inexperienced students. It appeals to that love of excitement which makes them rush to a surgical operation, or to an extraordinary medical case which may have no bearing whatever on their future practice, whilst the commonplace but all-important bedside observation seems dull in comparison. Yet patient work in the anatomical and microscopic rooms, and in the chemical laboratory for general and animal chemistry, and close clinical study, all of which involve no form of suffering, are of primary importance. ”

“ Now, our ignorance of much in Nature is no reproach to anyone; but the way in which curiosity is gratified marks the difference between the simple child and the rational adult. In the childish development curiosity, though useful, is superficial and short-sighted; it is necessarily a shallow impulse which cannot realize the wide relations of existence, and its satisfaction has no necessary connection with the acquisition of valuable knowledge. But the adult rises into a higher plane of thought. ”

“ As science searches for causes with their relations, and is proved knowledge, so no branch of knowledge or method of acquiring knowledge can be considered scientific which contradicts any facts of Nature, or which bases its methods on the destruction of those facts. ”

“ To my surprise, I found that the word 'science' was not included in the list of subjects. Searching further in this record of nineteenth-century thought, under the head of 'Biology'—that department which is ordinarily supposed to be the science of life, as distinguished from the consideration of non-living things—the following principle was found to be laid down, viz., that there was no essential difference between organized and unorganized Nature, for life was simply a property of matter. ”

“ The laws of our human constitution compel us to recognise that intellect and conscience, although essential parts, are not identical parts of our nature. Long experience shows us that social progress can only become permanent when conscience guides intelligence.
How far the guidance of conscience can extend, with the practical results to medical research involved in the recognition of such guidance, forms the subject of present consideration. ”

“ Biogenesis, or life generated by life, is the distinctive feature of organic Nature. We are linked to living creatures of higher or lower nature by the power of educating or subduing them, and by all those varying relations involved in the mystery of life.
The distinctive position of man, as an animal placed at the head of the animal world, necessarily creates serious responsibility on the part of the higher towards the lower creature. ”

“ In order to attain truth respecting biology, therefore, the facts concerning sensation and consciousness, and their relation with, or the way in which these new factors modify the facts of, physics and chemistry, must be carefully considered in this higher state, which we call life, or the investigation is not scientific, no matter how interesting as an intellectual exercise. ”

“ The temptation to make a display before imperfectly informed persons is too great. If the profession is to advance in popular esteem, it will recognise that the unfeeling destruction of living creatures, even the pithing of a frog or the dissection of the salivary glands of a living mouse, is a false method of forming the minds of students which should be entirely abandoned.
We must here note the demand lately made by some leading members of the profession for increased facilities for experimentation on animals. Now, anyone who studies the Cruelty to Animals Bill (30 and 40 Vict.) ”

“ IT is through the gradual and harmonious development of intelligence with that element in our nature that we name conscience that the human race passes from lower to higher states of civilization. In pursuing our ideals, conscience is our instinctive monitor of right and wrong. ”

“ The common-sense of mankind recognises our right to use the lower animals for human benefit, whilst our superior intelligence gives us the power to so use them. But 'can' and 'ought' are different aspects of our mental constitution, which require to he harmonized. What we can do is not the true measure of what we ought to do, in any department of life. ”

“ In considering the subject of experimentation, reason requires that we realize the necessary distinction between the methods employed in training students for a practical profession, and the exceptional position of the few geniuses who possess the rare combination of qualities essential to scientific investigation. ”

“ We are bound to realize that any custom, or method of education, or proposed course of action, that seems to violate the natural instincts of humanity, or is contrary to the present enlightened conscience of any section of our Anglo-American race, demands imperatively the most careful consideration on our part. ”

“ This is really a sound humane attitude of mind in that vast body of the profession who are unable, from the pressure of practical life, to devote themselves to investigation—a profession which has always had its heroes and martyrs, who have not shrunk from risking their lives in the service and for the advancement of their noble art. ”

“ Science being proved truth, scientific method requires that all the factors which concern the subject of research shall be duly considered, in order to arrive at correct thought respecting the special subject of inquiry. ”

“ The subject of experimentation upon the lower animals having two aspects—an ethical and an intellectual one—the medical profession will be wise to welcome all honest and kindly criticism and suggestion in the most difficult of all studies, viz., the study of life. It must be recognised that the people are absolutely in their right in refusing to submit to dictation in what concerns their relation to animal life, of which they are the responsible head. ”

“ Neither is there a doubt of the utility of rational experiment and of research. But the right to put to death in the most humane manner known to us, and the right to torture to death, are two widely different questions. ”

“ They are often applied to the accumulating of facts or of phenomena; but such accumulation is not necessarily science, and may even hinder science. For although the collecting of facts may bring together valuable materials essential for future use, it may also bring together rotten or sham materials, which will interfere with sound work. A faulty method of endeavouring to obtain facts may seriously destroy the value of the phenomena thus observed.
The gratification simply of intellectual activity or curiosity must not be confounded with genuine research. Curiosity is the outcome of ignorance. ”

“ As the brute creation, as well as human beings, share in a physical organization which expresses each variety of life, there is not the same sharply-dividing line between the various categories of animal life as there is between organic and inorganic Nature. ”

“ Now, the natural instinct to be cherished in human beings is protection and kindliness to infancy and all helpless creatures, not indifference to suffering or wilful infliction of it. As human conscience is a thing of growth or degradation, the natural shrinking from needless pain can soon be hardened into callousness. Conversing with medical students, in relation to the effect made upon them by witnessing vivisections, even under chloroform, I have found that their experience is always the same, viz.: first, the shock of repulsion, then tolerance, and then, if often repeated, indifference. ”