What animal experimentation or so-called vivisection has done for humanity / by J.P. Warbasse.
- James Peter Warbasse
- Date:
- 1911
Licence: In copyright
Credit: What animal experimentation or so-called vivisection has done for humanity / by J.P. Warbasse. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![to by these means. Were it not for animal e.xperiments we should still be groping in the dark in dealing with plague. The e.xperimcntors have sacrificed thousands of rats and many guinea-pigs, squirrels and fleas in discovering tlie nature of this disease. Let us see some of the things found out about it. The causative micro-organism, the bacillis pcstis, has been discovered. It has been found that this organism lives in the blood and lymph channels of rats and certain other rodents. It is also found in the intestinal canal of the flea which infests these rodents. Ex- periments have shown that it is the flea which carries the germ from the rat to man. llcfore this knowledge was finally worked out a number of experimentors had sacrificed their lives in the search, b'inally a preventive vaccine has been discovered. Of the experimentors some day it will be said, “They stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed.” For cholera, an antitoxic serum has been prepared by ex- perimenting on animals, and is now being used in India with good results. Diphtheria was once the dread of irH'ithers. It was the great destroyer of the young. Prior to 1883 in the largest eighteen cities in Europe and .America, ninety-seven in every one hundred thousand of the ])Oj)ulation died of this disease; and the mor- tality was steadily increasing because of the increasing density of j)0]Hilation. Then, as a result of experiments, tlie cause of the disease was discovered. That meant earlier and more certain recognition. The mortality in the same cities, in 1893, had de- clined to cighty-one. In 1894 it was seventy-nine. Then anti- to.xin, discovered by means of animal e.xperimentation, was intro- duced, and the mortality from diphtheria in these cities has been reduced to twenty per hundred thousand population. The dis- covery of the causative organism and of antitoxin has cut down the mortality to less than one fourth of what it had been. 1 can remember when surgeons were busy performing tracheotomy upon choking children. Every day I heard of them. Then intubation was hailed with great acclaim. Now the diph- theritic so rarely require these operations that among my own large professional acquaintance I do not hear of such an operation once a year. In the city of Baltimore, in 1894. the reported mortality from diphtheria was seventy-four per cent.; in 1895, seventy-one per cent.; in 1896, fifty-one ner oent. In 1897, antitoxin was intro- duced. and in the next vear, 1898. the mortality was five per cent. In New York City, in 1893, the year before antitoxin was introduced, there were seven thousand cases of diphtheria re- ported with two. thousand six hundred deaths, a mortality of thirty-six per cent. In 1898, the mortality was reduced to twelve per cent.; and in 1906, it was nine per cent. In the seventeen years in which antitoxin has been used in New York, fifty thousand children have been saved from death by this means.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22460676_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
