Remarks on the use of vivisection as a means of scientific research : in a letter addressed to the Earl of Caernarvon, President of the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals / by Richard Jameson.

Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the use of vivisection as a means of scientific research : in a letter addressed to the Earl of Caernarvon, President of the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals / by Richard Jameson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    my list the name of the late Dr. Hope, not less re- markable for his talents as a physician than for his fervent piety as a Christian. He experimented largely on living animtils, and in his Memoirs, recently pub- lished by his widow, many of these experiments are alluded to almost in the same chapter with passages full of the most enthusiastic effusions of devotion. I could adduce other instances of religious Vivi- sectors, but the illustrious names already quoted are more than sufficient to prove my assertion. I wish as much as your Lordship or any member of your Society that there were no such thing as pain in the world : but we must take the world as we find it ; with its good and its evil, its pain and its pleasure, its joy and its sorrow, endlessly mingled and alternating. A golden age such as Dr. Styles describes, in which beasts of prey and the weaker animals lived to- gether in harmony, could no more have had an actual existence than those “impenetrable scales” with which his liberal imagination has encased the whale*. We judge of God’s will by his works. What we see done we conclude he willed to be done. Now if * What the carnivora would find to live upon in such a golden age it would puzzle the Doctor to explain. But all theorizing on the subject is superfluous when we have the plainest facts to guide us. The fossil remains of the gigantie Ichthyosauii exhibit in the interior of their bodies various fragments of fishes, which they had swallowed during life. The stratum in which these fossils are discovered (the lias) belongs to a period long anterior to the creation of Mammalia or of Man. [See Dr. Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise, London, 183 7, and Agassiz, ‘Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles,’ Nefichatel, 1833—38.]