Vivisection and the diseases of animals.

  • Fleming, George, 1833-1901.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vivisection and the diseases of animals. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    to the human race, others to one or more species of animals ; while some, again, are widely transmissible from species to species. Many of those affecting the lower creatures can be conveyed to man—as rabies, glanders, anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, and probably tuber- culosis and diphtheria. There are also the parasitic diseases of ani- mals, several of which may be transmitted to ourselves—as trichinosis, and those due to various kinds of worms and to vegetable parasites. The intimate nature of the infective materials, or contagia, of communicable maladies is a discovery of almost yesterday ; but it has thrown a flood of light on their phenomena, and, with the aid of ex- perimental pathology, will enable us in all probability either to abolish them altogether, both in man and beast, or at least to render them nearly harmless. The agents in the transmission of contagious dis- eases—proved in some cases, and probably present in all—are minute organisms, which need almost the highest magnifying power of the microscope in order to examine them. They are endowed with most marvellous powers of multiplication, which enable them to act with deadly energy in a very brief space of time. Their discovery as lethal agencies was only', could only be, determined by means of experi- ments on living animals. And by experiments on animals alone was the next great ad- vance made. Having seized and identified the agent which pro- duces deadly disease, and having rendered it amenable to artificial cultivation in appropriate fluids, the organism which had hitherto been productive of such direful results in the bodies of its victims was now, by means of experiments on living creatures, to be made the servant and benefactor of mankind. The germ which under ordinary circumstances produced painful, and only too frequently fatal consequences, was, by means of arti- ficial cultivation, so modified, so attenuated in energy, that when again transferred to the animal body it had not only lost its dreadful malignity, but had been transformed into a protecting agent: it afforded immunity against the disease which it formerly produced. Every step in this grand and fecund discovery was accomplished by experiments on animals, and in no other way could it be effected. Inoculations had to be made to test the potency of the cultivated germs, and to ascertain to what extent their diminished energy was compatible with the existence of the inoculated creature, and with its immunity from the original disease. Experiments and control- experiments, very numerous no doubt, were absolutely essential in order to arrive at conclusions ; and the result has been the greatest discovery of this century, so far as medicine is concerned, a discovery which is destined to be of such vast benefit, as to rival, or perhaps ultimately excel, that conferred by Jenner upon his too often un- grateful fellow-men. The two diseases of the lower animals in which the experimental