An act causing pain or damage

Usage examples of infliction.

No agreement regarding vivisection can be anticipated or desired with any man who holds that some vague and uncertain addition to the sum total of knowledge would justify experiments made upon dying children in a hospital, without regard to their personal benefit, or sanction the infliction of any degree of agony upon animals in a laboratory.

The infliction of extreme pain either upon human beings or on animals for objects other than their own benefit--how far is it to be justified if some useful end is thereby achieved?

We believe, on the contrary, that many, if not all, of the higher species of animals, especially those nearest to man in structure and intelligence, receive, when subjected to the torment of fire or steel, precisely the same sensations that, under a like infliction, a human being would suffer.

Little Arcady still hold to account for the infliction of this relentless evangel.

Should it ever be known hereafter, at a time when he stood before the people as a candidate for some high political trust, that he had tamely submitted to the infliction of a cowskin, the revelation would be fatal to all his hopes of ambition, and conclusive against all his social pretensions.

In a mean and sordid society, he was an enthusiast for the acquisition of knowledge, and while his passion for physiology induced--as it so often does--an indifference regarding the infliction of pain, his pitiless vivisections were not more cruel than experiments made in this twentieth century, and some of them by men of national reputation.

It is probably not limited to the mental infliction of pain, as witness the posthypnotic command we can deduce compelled Luke Wallace to steal the bathynef and return to set the alien free from its buried hiding place.

By great good luck I was absent from the building with the squad drawing rations, when our room was inoculated, so I escaped what was an infliction to all, and fatal to many.

Does his lordship not see that it is not the inadequacy of the reforms that has set India aflame but that it is the infliction of the two wrongs and the wicked attempt to make us forget them?

It was much ado for me not to laugh, for my mischievous French-woman, who liked her coffee in the Parisian fashion, that is to say very sweet, was sipping the bitter beverage with an air of delight which compelled the director of the Mint to smile under the infliction.

The infliction of literalism on us by fundamentalists who read the Bible without seeing anything but words is one of the great tragedies of history.

Ophelia worrying herself, from day to day, with her, as a kind of chronic plague, to whose inflictions she became, in time, as accustomed, as persons sometimes do to the neuralgia or sick headache.

Marie paraded her new misery as the reason and apology for all sorts of inflictions on every one about her.

The Raiders who had been put into irons were very restive under the infliction, and begged Hill daily to release them.

Because death had been sudden, the heart had ceased pumping within a second or two of the infliction of the wounds, so only a few spoonsful of blood had leaked onto the tunnel floor.