Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/781

Rh with the medical properties of cinchona, mercury, opium, and chloroform. The great physiological discoveries, though interesting as curiosities, have not been for our good. What has come from the knowledge of the circulation of the blood? Are we any more able to cure affections of the spinal marrow because we know now, what we did not know a hundred years ago, that there are motor cords and sensitive cords in it? K mortality is less now than formerly, it is not in consequence of the progress of medicine, but of general hygiene. Now, as much as three hundred years ago, doctors are impotent to cure diseases, and all the improvements in modern medicine are due to the attentive observation of the sick, not to experiments on animals." This reasoning finds credit with the ignorant, for it artfully mingles a little truth with much error. The physician is, alas! too often powerless to contend against the ills that are raging around us. But, really, we can not expect physiology to cure incurable diseases and make men immortal; its mission is to discover the truth, and it is for the physician to apply the lessons of the new truth to the treatment of diseases. Who can say seriously that modern medicine, enlightened by the great physiological discoveries of this and former centuries, is not superior to the medicine of the middle ages? The circulation of the blood was discovered by vivisection. Can we form a practical conception of a doctor who does not believe in the circulation of the blood? Is there a man among the members of the Society for the Protection of Animals that would commit himself to the care of such a doctor? To be consistent, they should banish from therapeutics all of it that is the result of experiment, and accept only that which is due to chance or empiricism; there would be very little left! We should not have galvanic electricity, for all our knowledge of this is due to the experiments of vivisectors. We should possess, in the way of medicines, only a few simples, and should have to employ them empirically, without being permitted to obtain a clear idea of their dangers or their advantages. We should not have chloral, or injections of morphine, or bromide of potassium. We should be reduced to prescribe decoctions of cinchona, or that old theriac compounded of nearly two hundred plants of different properties.

It may be that the number of those whom modern medicine, relying upon experiment, has cured, is not large; but certainly the number whom it has relieved is immense. If it can not cure disease, it can at least prevent pain. Why, then, should so much account be taken of a few pains of animals in the face of the thousands of men we have saved from suffering? We should not be indignant that a dog may be sacrificed every day in the thirty physiological laboratories that are scattered over the whole world; for the thirty dogs that suffer bear no sort of proportion to the thousands of cases of pain through the whole civilized world which medicine abbreviates or diminishes in a single day. If the sick thus relieved could give their testimony and