Stephen Paget

“ It is impossible, however, to enumerate all the physiological gains of the last twenty or thirty years, or to point out their manifold applications in the cure and prevention of disease. The full control of the processes of disease, which is the goal of the physician and the surgeon, can only be attained through an accurate knowledge of the conditions governing the functions of the healthy body. The foundation of medicine and surgery is physiology: and it is only on living animals that the processes of life can be investigated. ”

“ Haffkine's inoculation method, which I claim, here in Hubli, to have put to perhaps the severest test to which it has yet been subjected, I am of the opinion that individual protection is, on however great a scale conducted, of less importance to that of general protection and hygiene (considering each method separately, that is to say) , for it seems to me more radical, if not more rational, to eradicate a disease than to leave it to pursue its course and only protect people against its ravages."
Sanitation, therefore, was Dr. Leumann's faith. ”

“ Thirty years ago, there was no bacteriology, in the present sense of the word: and now the "habits" of these "contagia" have been studied, outside and inside the body, with amazing accuracy. It has been proved, past all possibility of doubt, that the pathogenic bacteria are the cause of infective diseases; they have fulfilled Koch's postulates—that they should be found in the diseased tissues, be cultivated outside the body, reproduce the same disease in animals, and be found again in the tissues of those animals. ”

“ The physiology of the nervous system is wrought to finer issues now than in the time of Bell and Magendie; and this generation of students may live to see the present facts and methods of cerebral localisation as the mere rudiments or elements of science. Happily for mankind, science has already so far elucidated them that they have done good service for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and for the saving of lives. ”

“ Take a thousand cases of diphtheria from any civilised part of the world, in the days before antitoxin; how many of them died? Take a thousand cases now, treated with antitoxin; how many of them die? Why do Mr. Wood and Mr. Coleridge run away from that easy question? There is nothing unfair in it; they have all the reports before them; they know the facts well. We do not find any evidence that they are willing to acknowledge the truth of those facts. Follow Mr. Somerville Wood, from place to place, with his magic-lantern and his stock of lectures. ”

“ And we cannot admit that an animal under an anæsthetic, because it makes a movement, is in pain or is conscious; for we know that a patient under operation may move yet feel nothing. Every hospital surgeon, and every anæsthetist, who has seen a whole legion of patients go under chloroform or ether and come out of it, and everybody who has been under these anæsthetics, they all know that incomplete anæsthesia is not "sham anæsthesia," and that movements, even purposive movements, may occur without consciousness, without pain, alike in men and in animals. ”

“ Before all things, we must shut off the sources of the infection. For centuries, men had believed in exhalations and miasmata lying all over the land: and, behold, the agents of malaria are in the puddles round a man's house, and the agents of yellow fever are in the water-butt and the broken bottles and old sardine-tins. Science has given the word, and now there are Anopheles brigades and Culex brigades set going; labourers with brooms and rubbish-carts, sweeping out the stagnant pools, draining the surface soil, and carrying off the odd receptacles that serve to hold mosquito eggs and larvæ. ”

“ Verily, I pray you, O candid reader, studious of authority, but more studious of truth, to make experiment on animals. You will find the pulmonary vein full of blood, not air or fuligo, as these men call it, God help them. ”

“ No less pregnant of future discoveries was the idea suggested by this newly-found-out action of the hepatic tissue, the idea happily formulated by Bernard as 'internal secretion.' No part of physiology is at the present day being more fruitfully studied than that which deals with the changes which the blood undergoes as it sweeps through the several tissues, changes by the careful adaptation of which what we call the health of the body is secured, changes the failure or discordance of which entails disease. ”

“ Already the calm, reassuring voice of the new Life Science, loud and clear to the few, is faintly audible to the many. The sharp, crucial knife, with its dangerous quiver so dear to the heart of the surgeon, the poisonous drug, will be things of the past. ”

“ The time when a man is assailed by a large section of the press, threatened with violence by laymen, attacked on points relevant by vivisectors and points irrelevant by their supporters, is scarcely the moment that a generous rival would have chosen for hurling a dart; and yet, incredible as it may appear, the Honorary Secretary of another Anti-vivisection Society, seizing an opportunity afforded by an article in the Globe, enters the arena, and, by a letter repudiating any connection with Mr. Coleridge, appears to sanction the unfriendly criticisms expressed in that paper. ”

“ And now, as for the great quantity and forward movement of this blood on its way, when I shall have said what things remain to be said—though they are well worth considering, yet they are so new and strange that I not only fear harm from the envy of certain men, but am afraid lest I make all men my enemies; so does custom, or a doctrine once imbibed and fixed down by deep roots, like second nature, hold good among all men, and reverence for antiquity constrains them. ”

“ It fights hard against a fact which began in science, though it has been proved a thousand times over in practice. It accuses the bacteriologists now of caring nothing for human suffering, now of rushing after every new method of treatment and flooding the market with drugs. There is money in the business—that is the phrase of the Zoophilist. But there is money, also, in the anti-vivisection business. If you can provide for the society's future in your will, may we beg of you to do so? ”

“ Considering that the system is a new one, that the inoculations are purely voluntary, and everything connected with them has to be explained before the confidence of the people can be obtained, and considering how long new ideas are in taking root among the general population—and in this case it is not merely the acceptance of an idea, but such faith in it as to consent to submit to an operation—the number is certainly satisfactory for a beginning. ”

“ Let any man, who has but touched the study of physiology, consider what is involved in even the most superficial observation of the simplest facts of the nervous system: for instance, the ordinary nerve-muscle preparation that is taught to every medical student, or the microscopic structure of the spinal cord, or the Wallerian method. ”

“ Though the contrast is great between Hales' may-pole and Poiseuille's manometer, there is even a greater contrast between Poiseuille's mathematical calculations and Marey's practical use of the sphygmograph for the study of the blood-pressure in health and disease. Marey had the happiness of seeing medicine, physiology, and physics, all three of them working to one end:—
"La circulation du sang est un des sujets pour lesquels la médecine a le plus besoin de s'éclairer de la physiologie, et où celle-ci à son tour tire le plus de lumière des sciences physiques. ”

“ The Prejudiced Man takes it for granted that we, who differ from him, are universally impostors, tyrants, hypocrites, cowards, and slaves. If he meets with any story against us, on any or no authority, which does but fall in with this notion of us, he eagerly catches at it. Authority goes for nothing; likelihood, as he considers it, does instead of testimony; what he is now told is just what he expected. Perhaps it is a random report, put into circulation merely because it had a chance of succeeding, or thrown like a straw to the wind ”

“ When the Home Office allows a licensee to make a certain number of experiments, it means that he may experiment on that number of animals and no more. The Home Office, having heard what the experiments are to be, where they are to be made, on what kind of animals, and for what purpose, and having taken advice about them, allows him to make a fixed number, and adds any restrictions that it likes, e.g. that he must send in a preliminary report when he has made half that number. And one thing is certain, that one experiment = one animal, and that 10 experiments = 10 animals, and no more. ”

“ It is the same with all the pathogenic bacteria—each kind has its own habits, phases and idiosyncrasies, antagonisms and preferences: nothing is left unstudied—the influences of air, light, heat, and chemistry; all the facts of their growth, division, range of variation, grades of virulence, vitality, and products; the entire life and death of each species, and everything that it is, and does, and can be made to do. ”

“ Anyhow, lecturing a quarter of a century ago on diabetes, his special subject, Claude Bernard spoke out his longing to compel men into the ways of science, to give them some immediate sign which they could not refuse to see:—
"At this present time, medicine is passing from one period to another. The old traditions are losing ground, and scientific medicine (la médecine expérimentale) has got hold of all our younger men: every day it gains ground, and will establish itself against all its critics, and in spite of the excesses of those who are over-zealous for its honour.... ”

“ If any man would measure one very small part of the lives that are saved by this method, let him contrast the treatment of empyema fifty years ago with its treatment now. If he would measure the saving, not of lives but of limbs, let him take the treatment of compound fractures. If he would measure the saving of patients from pain, fever, and long confinement to bed, let him take the ordinary run of surgical cases, not only the major operations but all abscesses, lacerated wounds, foul sores, and so forth. ”

“ One society advertised, in a daily paper, that it wanted confidential communications, from medical students, as to the practices of the laboratory. Another, seeing the chance of a prosecution, says, "Special inquiries were made on the subject, and the society's solicitor went to Belfast to conduct these inquiries on the spot." All this espionage is sure now and again, in thirty years, to detect something which it can magnify into a scandal. And when a fault is found, even a little one, oh the joy in the ranks of the societies. ”

“ The pancreas is no longer taken to be only a sort of salivary gland out of place: over and above the secretion that it pours into the intestines, it has an "internal secretion," a constituent of the blood: it belongs not only to the digestive system, but also, like the thyroid gland and the suprarenal capsules, to the whole chemistry of the blood and the tissues. So far has physiology come, unaided by anatomy, from the fantastic notions of Lindanus and the men of his time: and has come every inch of the way by the help of experiments on animals. ”

“ Horses are very apt to be infected by tetanus; and the antitoxin has been used in veterinary practice, both for prevention and for cure. The curative results are not, at present, very good. But, as regards protection against the disease, there is evidence that horses can be immunised against tetanus by the antitoxin with almost mechanical accuracy. In some parts of the world, the loss of horses by tetanus is so common that their immunity is a very important matter; and that the antitoxin does confer immunity on them is shown by statistics from France and from the United States ”

“ Holländer, who thinks very highly of Gall's system of phrenology, says, Is the laboratory-man, the experimental physiologist, to teach us the mental functions of the brain from his experiments on frogs, pigeons, rabbits, dogs, cats, and monkeys? That is the argument; that we must not compare the monkey's motor areas with the man's motor areas, for we cannot find the mind of a man in the brain of a frog. 337
But, putting aside phrenology, which is a broken reed for anti-vivisection to lean on, what other arguments are urged against the facts of cerebral localisation? ”

“ I dogmatically postulate humaneness as a condition of worthy personal character." (Mr. Bernard Shaw.)
"The vivisector, when he stands over his animal, whether with anæsthetics or without anæsthetics, is creating, even if the physical health of the nation is enhanced by it, a moral shroud not only for himself, but a moral shroud the edges of which are continually extending into the thought atmosphere, and so deadening the national conscience at large." ”

“ Many parasites employ, in various ways, a second species of animal as a go-between. Thus, some tapeworms, and the worms which cause trichinosis, spend a part of their lives in the flesh of swine, and transfer themselves to human beings when the latter eat this flesh. To complete the cycle, the parasites return to swine from human offal; so that they propagate alternately from men to swine, and from swine to men. The blood-parasites which cause the deadly tsetse-fly disease among cattle in South Africa are transferred from one ox to another on the proboscis of the ox-biting or tsetse-fly. ”

“ It has been urged that those who received inoculation were of a class or classes better protected than others against plague by reason of their habits, the food they eat, the houses they live in, etc. In reply, I unhesitatingly state that if there be but one town in India where that line of argument will not hold good, it certainly is Hubli; for not only were the poorer, dirtier, lower-caste people the first to be persuaded to receive inoculation, but I made it my personal and special duty to work amongst them. ”

“ The difficulties of bacteriology are written across every page of the text-books: above all, the difficulties of attenuating or intensifying the virulence of bacteria, and of immunising animals, and of procuring from them an immunising serum of exact and constant strength. Every antitoxin is the outcome of an immeasurable expenditure of hard international work, unsurpassed in all science for the fineness of its methods and the closeness of its arguments.
The older theories of disease had attributed infection to the intemperature of the weather, the powers of the air, or the work of the devil ”

“ But when the blood is driven with violence from the veins into the arteries, forthwith there is disease; and the blood is poured the wrong way into the arteries, and there withstands and dashes itself against the breath of life coming from the heart, and turns the course of it—and this forsooth is fever. ”

“ Just as the grosser parasites, the tapeworms, must alternate between man and certain animals, and cannot otherwise go through their own life-changes and reproduce their kind, so the micro-parasites that are the cause of malaria alternate between man and the mosquito, having the mosquito as an intermediate host. These organisms, once they get into the mosquito, pick out certain structures, and there carry out a definite cyclical phase of their lives, whereby their progeny make their way into the stylets of the mosquito, and so get back to man, who is their "definite host." ”

“ These careless, indolent, inaccurate persons, who think so lightly of the National Society's officers, and draft a question so silly that the whole cause is damaged, bring us back to the point whence we started: the want of unity between the societies, the frequent jarring of one with another. We have still to see something of the dealings of the National Society with Government. ”

“ The action of drugs on man differs from that on the lower animals chiefly in respect to the brain, which is so much more greatly developed in man. Where the structure of an organ or tissue is nearly the same in man and in the lower animals, the action of drugs upon it is similar. Thus we find that carbonic oxide, and nitrites, produce similar changes in the blood of frogs, dogs, and man, that curare paralyses the motor nerves, alike in them all, and veratria exerts upon the muscles of each its peculiar stimulant and paralysing action. ”

“ All men are by nature phrenologists; the commonplace excuses that are offered for lapses of memory, venial offences, and inherited weaknesses, all appeal to the comfortable notion that the offender is not wholly perverted, and that some very small and strictly localised group of cells is at fault. And it is probable that the physiology of the central nervous system, with its present strong tendency toward psychology, will some day be back, at a far higher level, above the point where phrenology went wrong. ”

“ A man has some disease, acute or chronic, of his brain; and, as the disease advances, twitchings occur in one arm or one leg, little irrational useless movements, or rigidity, or loss of power, according to the case. Is it pure nonsense to believe that the disease has reached a certain spot on the surface of his brain? ”

“ You bring the speaker down to now and here, to the text of the Act, to the reports to Government, to the Home Secretary's own words in Parliament; and you are told that they are all in a conspiracy, all liars more or less, and that the truth is in the societies, especially in one of them. Or you bring him down to the good 329 that these experiments have done, the lives that they have saved; and at once he is off like the wind:—
"The society does not concern itself with the results of vivisection, whether good or bad, and thinks it is beside the mark to discuss them." ”

“ Among the researches of the last thirty years, those bearing on the Circulation of the Blood must take an important place, both for their physiological interest and for the weighty influence they have exerted on our knowledge and treatment of disorders of the vascular system, such as heart disease. ”