Broken gods: a reply to Mr. Stephen Paget's "Experiments on animals" / with an introduction by the Hon. Stephen Coleridge.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Broken gods: a reply to Mr. Stephen Paget's "Experiments on animals" / with an introduction by the Hon. Stephen Coleridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/152
    so large a section of the thinking and humane public abhor. No doubt Mr. Paget has done the very utmost that could be done for what is a bad case —bad on the scientific side and infinitely worse on that of ethics. In the following pages Mr. Paget’s examples are taken one by one and his contentions tested by historical facts and by the utterances of experts who have surveyed the same fields of observation, and for the most part by reference to standard works on medi- cine, surgery, and materia medica of unimpeachable authority. Mr. Paget says that his only way of an- swering us was “ to give the original authorities, the plain facts, the very words, chapter and verse, for everything.” But the work of those authorities has been overhauled times without number by other authorities equally eminent in their own departments of medical science, and their results have, above all, been tested by chnicians whose business it has been to test at the bedside the value of the lessons imparted from the laboratory. Mr. Paget has not based his con- tentions on the ground of advantage to abstract science, but on that of utihty to practical medicine. On this basis the answer contained in the following pages is built up. To learn by cruel experiment what nerves infiuence the wagging of a dog’s tail or the arching of a cat’s back does not seem very important to us as doc- tors. What is the cause of and remedy for cancer, for diabetes, for plague, and yellow fever, on the other hand, is of the utmost importance to the practitioner of medicine, and how far experiments on animals have helped them in deahng with such maladies is a legitimate subject for unbiassed inquiry such as is pursued in the present treatise. London, April 4, 1903. Edward Berdoe.