The uselessness of vivisection upon animals as a method of scientific research / by Lawson Tait.

  • Tait, Lawson, 1845-1899.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The uselessness of vivisection upon animals as a method of scientific research / by Lawson Tait. 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.

    11/44 (page 127)
    watch by experimenting with an upright pendulum clock. There is a perfectly parallel dissimilarity between the functions and the diseases of animals and those of man. In the same article is a quotation from the article of Sir William Gull, to the effect that the experiments of Bernai-d, in baking living dogs to death in an oven have opened the way to our understanding the pathology of fever. In zymotic diseases the elevated temperature is not a cause of the disease but its consequence, and the answer to the argument is that not a single contribution of any kind has yet been made to the cure of scarlet fever. Its course cannot be shortened by one horn- Medicine is powerless for the cure of zymotics, whilst hygiene is all-powerful in their prevention, and the medicine of the future lies wholly in this direction. Drugs are impotent, but sanitary laws can and will banish all these diseases, when they are completely understood and fulfilled. The ai'ticle continues that between 1864 and 1867 seven new drugs were added to the Pharmacopoea, of which at least the two most useful, carbolic acid and physostigma, ai'e due to vivisection. Upon the question of new drugs I can speak only with great reserve, for such a wholesome scepticism concerning drugs has been introduced by the medical schism of homoeo- pathy, that I look upon all new drugs with great suspicion. Sir William Gull himself says he has not much belief in drugs. I fear most new drugs do more harm than good; some of them, such as chloral, most certainly have done so. I cannot learn that physostigma is of any practical service, and I have shown in my published writings that carbolic acid has done far more harm than good. Perhaps it would have been better if we had never heard of it. The question of the investigation of the actions of drugs by experiments on animals I have to confess is a very difficult one, because after we have found out what they do in one animal we find that in another the results are wholly different, and the process of investigation has to be repeated in man. Not only so, but in human individuals the actions of drugs in very many cases vary so much, that each fresh patient