The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    iions of the bodies of each, is to make no new discovery by means of Tivisection, though perhaps the experiment had never previously been tried in the same manner. We already knew that portions of flesh transplanted to the surface of a wound will grow there. Within the past few years a small, but very influential school has arisen within the ranks of the medical profession, which aims at dominating it, and which claims that it can only be raised from empiricism by the efforts of the experi- mental physiologist and pathologist. But the highest authorities in medicine incline to the opinion that therapeutics will never be Hberated from a certain cultivated empiricism, because it is almost impossible to find precisely the same •conditions of temperament, idiosyncracy, and other qualifying circumstances in different cases. Professor Wood therefore says in the preface to his great work on Therapeutics : The old and tried method in therapeutics is that of empiricism, or if the term sounds harsh, of clinical experience. When we say that these experiments upon animals are useless for the advancement of medicine and surgery, we do not mean to imply that they have no abstract scientific value. What we do mean is that not only have they failed hitherto to lead to any important discoveries in either of these sciences, but that they have actually proved to be misleading. You may dissect out the great arteries from living frogs, and in that condition keep them alive for four or five days, as Mr. John G. Adami did recently at the New Museum. You may insert glass chambers into the bowels of living rabbits