The moral aspects of vivisection / By Frances Power Cobbe.

  • Frances Power Cobbe
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral aspects of vivisection / By Frances Power Cobbe. 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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    race-course, or the prevalence of an idle delusion in certain urban coteries. Such manifestation is, I apprehend, actually observable in the very rapid extension of the practice of painful Experiments on Animals, to which some prominence has lately been given in public discussion. In the present paper, I purpose stu- diously to avoid detailing, or even alluding specifically to, any of the multiform horrors which are classified under the name of Vivisections. But without harrowing the reader by similar descriptions, I shall merely point to such experiments as those narrated by Dr. Hoggan, and the singularly ingenious varieties of torture which fill the large volumes of French and English physiological Handbooks, and suggest to my readers the inquiry; Whether this sort of thing be not strangely at variance with the tone of thought and practice which at present prevail in other departments of human activity ; and whether such books, for example, as these Catechisms of the Art of Torture, do not even stand unique in the literature of the world ? While our legislation tends to an almost excessive lenity towards criminals; while our Art and our Letters be- come yearly more refined and fastidious; while our manners grow more uniformly courteous towards all classes ; and while, in a very special manner, we are beginning to take a new interest in the intelligence and affections of the lower animals, and to visit their cruel treatment with condign punishment,— in the midst of all this humanizing process we suddenly find a break, a pause, nay, a very decided retrograde movement. It is at least fitting that we should inquire into the meaning of this strange and startling phenomenon. Let us suppose, to aid our imagination, that something analogous to vivisection were going on in some other department of activity, say of Art. There are legends (probably mythical) that dilettante sovereigns in the Cinque Cento age, when Art was supreme as Science is now, were so anxious to aid the great painters at their work.
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