Rather than continuing with futile attempts to prosecute vivisectionists, pragmatic campaigners tried to instil compassion into the young through anti-cruelty clubs such as the Band of Mercy
movement.81 It is apparent from the voluminous and sometimes tedious polemics published at this time that enthusiasts for, and critics of, vivisection were now relying on very different arguments. For vivisectionists, the justification of their experiments was a utilitarian
one, since the predicted benefits to medicine outweighed any suffering, and they saw their opponents, as the ageing Darwin
penned to The Times in 1876, as tender-hearted but profoundly ignorant.82 For their part, anti-vivisectionists laboured the point that anyone who experimented on living animals was callous and insensitive, character
traits typically associated with the unthinking lower classes
, and certainly undesirable in a medical practitioner or scientist. By the end of the nineteenth century, the sentiment was common among the public that, as Queen Victoria
had put it, animal experimentation was: ‘horrible, brutalising, unchristianlike’, and ‘one of the worst signs of wickedness in human nature’. With its focus on reducing the pain experienced by animals and licensing scientists, the Vivisection Act
had done nothing to address fears that vivisection ‘saps our moral
sense’, ‘blunts our sympathy’, and promotes ‘ruthlessness and oppression’.83
In fact, only a small minority of doctors was ever actually involved with animal experiments, and most preferred to avoid them. Despite their stereotypical portrayal in literature as callous and undisciplined, medical students
generally shunned vivisection, and it was little used in British medical schools, where many of the teachers shared anatomist Josef Hyrtl
’s (1810–1894) view that anyone who could look calmly on vivisection would not make a good physician.84 The VSS
, claiming that the new cadre of licensed, professional vivisectors would become so indifferent to suffering that experimentation would be ‘the simple, natural thing to do to any helpless creature in their hands’, stoked fears
that it would be extended to human subjects.85 Of course, patients were not tied to tables and cut up except in the pages of sensational fiction, but there were other ways of experimenting. The microbiologist Robert Koch
(1843–1910) actually did experiment on paupers; Louis Pasteur
(1822–1895) proposed experimenting on prisoners, and the dermatologist Jonathan Hutchinson
(1828–1913) delayed the treatment of a patient with a painful disease the better to demonstrate the signs to his students, all actions, according to the VSS
, to which no vivisectionist could logically object.86 Though doctors who vivisected may not have treated patients themselves, they could still set a bad example to those who did: if even the most distinguished scientists, wrote Lewis
Carroll
(Charles Dodgson
SeeSeeCarroll, Lewis
, 1832–1898), were careless of the suffering they caused, ‘what will be the temper of mind of the ordinary coarse, rough man… of whom the bulk of the medical profession… is made up?’87
Wary of being thought at best heartless and at worst dangerous, experimental physiologists
liked to emphasise that their chosen work was disagreeable
to them. According to one sympathetic account, the real sacrifices were being made not by the animals but the experimenters: ‘we have heard a considerable number of physiologists
declare unanimously, that all vivisection tires them exceedingly; sometimes so shatters them, that it requires all their power of will to carry the process through to the accomplishment of the aim…’.88 This at least indicates they were aware of the importance of character and sensibility in determining how others judged their actions. From a utilitarian
perspective, the case for vivisection would have been stronger if, in addition to acquiring knowledge from it, physiologists enjoyed their work rather than enduring it; by stating that they undertook experiments reluctantly
and at great emotional cost to themselves, they were defending their personal virtue
by taking on the persona of the heroic scientist who suffers emotional difficulty through being obliged to transgress normal moral boundaries for the sake of science
.
George Romanes
(1848–1894), Darwin
’s disciple, stressed that students of physiology must be none the less gentlemen because they were men of science
, though the attitudes characteristic of genteel conduct could be difficult to square with what went on in the laboratory.89 Burdon-Sanderson’s
private admission that ‘emotional and sentimental
states’ such as sympathy were an experimenter’s ‘greatest enemies’ implies a more heartless attitude than that typically expected of a gentleman
, though some physiologists may have thought privately what Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull
(1816–1890) declared openly: that gentlemen-scientists were above the law, and that anti-cruelty legislation was ‘for the ignorant, and not for the best people in the country’.90
How people answered such questions would determine whether they gave their money, and trusted their health, to vivisectionists, and whether they saw the rise of laboratory medicine as a major advance or a wrong turning.
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