The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    ■words of Robert Browning, himself an uncomioromising opponent of yivisection, God uiade all the creatures and gave tliem our love and our fear, To give sign, we and they are His children, one family here. But the opponents of vivisection are quite competent to judge, even without any special medical training, that a practice about ■which so many adverse things have been said, even by those -who are its advocates, cannot be founded on a very firm scientific basis. Whilst, therefore, ■we must admit that ■what is termed the scientific -world is largely against us, we have no lack of unassailable scientific authority for our contention that in relation to medical science—for -which only, in this country at least it is maintained that vivisection is indispensable—the ■claims advanced on behalf of vivisection are usually greatly •exaggerated and unsu]Dported by the facts. In considering the question of the value of vivisection, we must not omit to explain at the outset, that even if -we grant that it occasionally leads to discoveries, we consider it unfair to attribute them to -vivisection if they could have been arrived at by observations on human beings. To puta plaster- •of-Paris jacket on a guinea-pig or rabbit, as -was done the other-day, and so constrict its breathing and other organs as to kill it, is not to discover the evils of tight-lacing by experi- ments on living animals. These evils have all been recog- nised before, and the pout mortem table ■will unhappily con- tinue to exhibit them abundantly. To gro-w a living rat together with a cat by bringing and fastening together por-