Trials

Usage examples of experimentation.

It is necessary at the outset, however, to draw a careful distinction between those phases of experimentation upon man which seem to be legitimate and right, and those other pases of inquiry which are clearly immoral.

In defence of vivisection or of unrestricted experimentation, he says that UNTRUTHFUL CLAIMS OF UTILITY have been made.

We find a Royal Commission in England, composed almost entirely of scientific men, everyone of them favourable to animal experimentation, devoting years to an inquiry concerning not vivisection only, but the working of the law by which it is regulated.

But James knew precisely what the vivisection of animals meant, for he had taught physiology, and had been engaged in experimentation for more than a quarter of a century.

It was not animal experimentation that he condemned, but the cruelty that sometimes accompanies it, and to which, if vivisection be unregulated by law, it is so often liable.

APPENDIX X In the spring of 1915, the Society for the Prevention of Abuse in Animal Experimentation decided to ascertain whether certain of the principal facts connected with vivisection would be freely given if courteously asked.

It has led to innumerable men and women of education and refinement to remit all questions of animal experimentation to the vivisector and his friends, precisely as they would have done had they lived three centuries ago, and had it been theirs to decide on the morality of burning a witch.

It concerns not the prevention of all experimentation upon animals, but rather the abolition of its cruelty, its secrecy, its abuse.

Though the first edition of the present work was quite large, yet no challenge of the accuracy of any of its statements concerning experimentation upon human beings or animals has yet appeared.

Is public opinion to-day inclined to be any more favourable to the legal abolition of all scientific experimentation upon animals than it was a third of a century ago?

Both are wrong if one meaning is to answer for all varieties of experimentation upon living things.

Some years ago the attempt was made to obtain the view of animal experimentation held by certain classes of intelligent men and women.

The cruelties that accompany research will always accompany it, until all scientific experimentation upon animals is made a criminal offence.

In other words, every conceivable phase of scientific experimentation upon living creatures, even if absolutely painless, should be made a legal offence.

During their medical studies they were continually imbued with the idea that the opposition to laboratory freedom of experimentation was an agitation of comparatively recent date, and confined to a small class of unthinking sentimentalists.