Dr. Walter Robert Hadwen's works.

  • Walter Hadwen
Date:
1896-1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Dr. Walter Robert Hadwen's works. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    0 ( 17 ) murder. What Taylor did after he did not know. As to the drug curare Dr. Eastham had completely given his case away, because one of the letters stated that it had been given up, which showed that it had been used. Another professor admitted having given it in four cases, and so on. One said he could not get any, which showed that he had been trying. He (Dr. Hadwen) had written a pamphlet called Some Recent Vivisections in English Laboratories,'' which anybody could get by applying for it at the office of the British Union, 32, Charing Cross, London, in which he had collected from the vivisectors' own books many cases in which curare was given. He did not mean to suggest that it was used daily, and he had not used that expression, but it had certainly not been given up. The question of a medical man who experimented being conscientious had nothing to do with the case at all. He declaimed against any medical man having a conscience torturing the poor creatures in order to get something out of their torture for their own benefit. An argument had been adduced that Galen found the arteries did not contain air, but blood. Galeu Need Not Have Tortured a poor sensitive creature, for he could have cut his own skin and found it out in two minutes. He did not know of anything more fallacious than the arguments Dr. Eastham brought forward. There was scarcely any drug they could be positive about by drawing an analogy between an animal and a human being. With reference to the state- ment as to the circulation of the blood, it would be a total im- possibility to discover it by cutting into the living. It was not discovered until some ten years after Harvey, when Malpighi invented the microscope, and saw for the first time the delicate capillary vessels that completed the junction of the arterial and venous systems, which anyone could see to-day by examining the web of a frog's foot. Dr. Eastham had spoken of vivisection as being useful to discover the action of drugs upon living tissue. He supposed a grain of morphia might send anyone in that room into the next world. But they could give a pigeon twelve grains, and it would be as merry as a cricket on the hearth. They could give rabbits belladonna, goats hemlock, and they would not be any the worse, and goats could eat and chew tobacco like cabbage leaves without feeling any ill effects. Prussic acid could be given to horses with almost impunity, and yet a grain would lull off an elephant.
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