Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/184

172 note that the performance of the ten experiments above described involves only the pain of a hypodermic injection or of pithing, since, whenever the animal is alive during the operation, complete insensibility is produced by anæsthetics. Most of the experiments, however, are done upon dead animals—that is, a man treated in like manner would be legally defunct. In the ordinary sense of the word, therefore, such experiments are not vivisections at all, although they are so by virtue of the persistence of vitality in certain organs and tissues. According to information from various sources, it is probable that the large majority of experiments in this State, whether in medical colleges or other institutions, whether for research or for teaching, are, like those described above, performed upon animals completely anæsthetized or actually dead.

II. Many persons find it difficult to dissociate the word vivisection from the sufferings which were, perhaps, unavoidable before the discovery of ether and chloroform, and from those which are inflicted at the present day by careless or unfeeling experimenters. The proposed laws likewise ignore the difference between experiments in respect to pain. In England the question has been similarly befogged by the use of a single term for two different ideas. In the face of the official reports showing, according to Dr. Gerald Yeo's later estimate, that only twenty-five out of one hundred experiments caused any pain at all, Frances Power Cobbe has the hardihood to say, "We find it practically impossible to separate torturing from non-torturing vivisection." In view of all this ambiguity, whether due to ignorance or design, I have ventured to suggest that painful vivisection be known as sentisection, and painless vivisection as callisection. The desirability of some verbal distinction was presented to Mr. Bergh, both in the article referred to and in private letters, dated February, 1880, and October 1882. His only reply is the following, dated November 3,