William Williams Keen

“ A experiment on a mouse or a rabbit would have taught them the danger of this frightful poison; but, in ignorance of its subtle properties, they became its unhappy victims, for one died and the other suffered intellectual death. Yet the promoters of this bill would not suffer us to make any experiments on the lower animals so as to protect man from such catastrophes. It is by experiments on animals that medicine has learned the benefits, but also has been taught to avoid the dangers of many potent drugs—as chloroform, chloral, and morphia. ”

“ To say nothing of ether and chloroform, whose safer use Bert has investigated in France, nor of cocaine, to which I have already alluded, let us see what experiments on animals have shown us as to bromide of ethyl—an anæsthetic lately revived in surgery. Its revival has quickly been followed by its abandonment on account of the frequent sacrifice of human life—that is to say, experiments on human beings have proved it to be deadly. ”

“ I had also intended to refer in detail to the splendid results of vivisection in relieving the sufferings of animals, and in preventing enormous pecuniary loss to man. We are only beginning to see that vivisection is as humane to animal life and suffering as it is to human, and that for financial reasons as well as humane motives it is of the utmost importance to the State that such diseases as cattle-plague, splenic fever, chicken-cholera, swine-plague, and others, should be eradicated. ”

“ Again, it must be borne in mind that, as in nearly every other advance in civilization and in society, so in medicine, causes are rarely single, but generally multiple and interwoven. While vivisection has been a most potent factor in medical progress, it is only one of several factors the disentanglement of which and the exact balancing of how much is due to this or to that are often difficult and sometimes impossible. ”

“ The ideal anæsthetic, that will abolish pain without abolishing consciousness, and do so without danger, is yet to be found. Cocaine is our nearest approach to it. Now, in all fairness and common sense, would it be real kindness or real cruelty to obstruct the search for such an anæsthetic—a search which will surely be rewarded by success, but which, if not carried on by experiments on animals, must be tried by deadly experiments upon man, or else be hopelessly given up?
In 1869 I was called to see a man suffering to the last degree from an abscess in the loin. ”

“ My own professional life only covers twenty-three years, yet in that time I have seen our knowledge of inflammation wholly changed, and the practice of surgery so revolutionized that what would have been impossible audacity in 1862 has become ordinary practice in 1885.
It would seem that so old a process as inflammation would long ago have been known through and through, and that nothing new could be adduced. In 1851, however, Claude-Bernard, by a slight operation, divided the sympathetic nerve in a rabbit's neck and showed its influence on the caliber of the blood-vessels. ”

“ As a result of their labors, the brain is now mapped out with reasonable accuracy, so that, given certain hitherto ill-understood or obscure localized symptoms, we can now say that there is certainly a tumor, an abscess, or other disease in precisely this or that locality. True, we can doubtfully infer somewhat of the same from the cruel experiments of disease on man. But Nature's experiments are rarely ever limited in area or uncomplicated; they are never systematic and exhaustive ”

“ One hundred and ninety-eight times the kidney has been removed, and 105 human lives have been saved; 83 times abscesses in the kidney have been opened, and 66 lives saved; 17 times stones have been removed from the kidney without a single death—or, in all, in the last fifteen years, 298 operations, and 188 human lives saved. Besides this, as an extension of the operation in 17 cases, in which the kidney, having no such attachments as ought to anchor it in place, was floating loosely in the abdomen and a source of severe pain, it has been cut down upon and sewed fast in its proper place ”

“ Formad, has made important experiments on the nature of diphtheria, and when we learn, as we probably soon shall, how to deal with the microscopic forms of life which seem to be its cause, it will not be too much to hope that we may be able to cope far more successfully with a disease now desolating so many homes.
In India alone twenty thousand human beings die annually from snake-bite, [11] and as yet no antidote has been discovered. How can we search intelligently for an antidote until we know accurately the effects of the poison? This can not be studied on man ”

“ Epithets and invective have been freely used, but, as befits the audience and the occasion, I shall endeavor to approach it in a perfectly calm and fair spirit, seeking to lay before you only one aspect of a many-sided question, viz., the actual practical benefits it has conferred upon man and animals—a fact that is constantly denied, but which medical evidence proves to be incontestable. ”

“ This is but one illustration of the value of experiments upon animals in the realm of new drugs. In fact, substitute for cocaine other drugs, or new operations, or new methods of medical treatment, and the argument repeats itself for each. Within the last thirty years a multitude of new drugs have thus been discovered, and their effects have been either first tested upon animals, or their properties studied exhaustively in a manner impracticable upon man. ”

“ As to cholera, the classic experiments of Thiersch, in 1853, [19] are well known. He inoculated fifty-six mice with cholera-discharges. Of these, forty-four sickened and fourteen died from choleraic diseases. In the same year two water companies in London experimented on 500,000 human beings, one of them inoculating its patrons with cholera-discharges through its impure water-supply. This one sickened thousands and killed 3,476 human beings, most of whom might have escaped had the lessons of Thiersch's fourteen mice been heeded. To ask the question, which was the more cruel, is to answer it. ”

“ The suspected expectoration or discharge is placed in a suitable soil, and after cultivation some of this growth is placed in another culture-soil, and so on till generation after generation is produced, the violence of the poison being modified by each culture. A small portion of any one of these cultures is then injected under the skin of a mouse or other animal, and in time it dies or is killed, and the results are verified by the post-mortem. ”

“ The value of these experiments, both to human life and to commerce, you know even from the daily papers.
You will find it difficult to make the non-medical public understand—nay, you yourselves as yet hardly understand—the enormous advance in medicine and surgery brought about by recent researches on inflammation, and by the use of antiseptics. ”

“ These experiments have often been alluded to as "baking animals alive." You will note that the heat was no greater than that to which laborers are frequently exposed in our hot summer-days, when working in the sun or in many industrial works. His experiments showed that the effects of sunstroke—or, as he happily termed it, Thermic or heat fever, a scientific name now widely adopted—were solely due to the heat, death following from coagulation of the muscular structure of the heart, or by its effects on the brain. ”

“ We may reject the spray and carbolic acid, but the surgical world, regardless of details, with few exceptions follows the principles upon which his method is founded and humanity is the gainer, by the nearly total abolition of inflammation, suppuration, secondary hæmorrhage, blood-poisoning, gangrene, and erysipelas, as sequels of accidents and operations; by the practicable relief from suffering and death, by operations formerly impossible ”

“ Brown-Séquard's experiments on epilepsy, the modern extraordinary advance in nearly all the diseases of the nervous system, and a number of other discoveries, as to all of which experiments upon animals have added largely to our knowledge, and therefore to our means of diminishing suffering and saving human life. ”

“ If not, the only alternative we have is to try them on the lower animals, and we would be most unwise, nay, more, we would be cruel, cruel both to man and to animals, if we refused to pain or even to slay a few animals, that thousands, both of men and of animals, might live. ”

“ To grow better, we must try new methods, give new drugs, perform new operations, or perform old ones in new ways; that is to say, we must make experiments. To these experiments there must be a beginning: they must be tried first on some living body; for it is often forgotten that the dead body can only teach manual dexterity. ”

“ At present our strenuous efforts are all in one direction—viz., to study these microbes by the microscope, by clinical observation, and by experiments on animals, in order to find out their origin, causes, growth, and effects, and to discover by what means their deadly results may be avoided, or by what remedies, without harm to the patient, they may themselves be destroyed. ”

“ November 2d, of last year, a man was brought to the Chambers Street Hospital, in New York, with a pistol-shot wound in the abdomen. Under careful antiseptic precautions, and following the indications of Parkes, the abdomen was opened by Dr. Bull, [7] coil after coil of the intestines was drawn out, the bullet was found and removed, and seven wounds of the intestines were successively discovered and properly treated, and the patient made an uninterrupted recovery. ”