Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/807

Rh three laboratories in this country and a number of the leading laboratories abroad, I have never had occasion to perform or witness an experiment of this painful class. Discovery of new anæsthetics and more recent methods of operation have doubtless reduced the pain of experimentation even below Yeo's estimate. In all laboratories in this country, and equally abroad, I have always found anæsthetics adequately and uniformly employed.

In the recent discussions before the House Judiciary Committee of Massachusetts upon the bill relating to inspection of vivisectional experiments in the medical schools and universities of the State, none of the petitioners for the bill were able to cite a single case, or the reasonable suspicion of a case, of abuse of vivisection, as having occurred within the State of Massachusetts, In order to obtain as reliable data as possible upon this point, I sent blank tables, arranged according to the table below, to all the laboratories in Massachusetts where vivisectional experiments were likely to be made. Returns were kindly sent in from all the laboratories, and may safely be taken to represent the experimental work in the State during the year 1894-'95.

Contrast with this the 34,419 human beings who die of disease annually in Massachusetts.

A general principle underlying vivisectional work is also revealed in the table, viz., that the lowest animal adequate for the purposes of the research be employed in preference to one more highly organized. This entirely negatives an assumption often advanced that animal vivisection tends toward human vivisection. The whole tendency of modern physiology has been exactly the reverse. Animals have come to be used in order to save human beings from abuse. In the very beginning of medicine