Animal experimentation and medical progress / by William Williams Keen.

  • Keen, William W. (William Williams), 1837-1932.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animal experimentation and medical progress / by William Williams Keen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/352
    the total disappearance of “hospital gangrene,” and the al¬ most total abolition of tetanus (saving in neglected cases). The Panama Canal has been made a possibility; from our Southern cities have been banished the frightful epi¬ demics of yellow fever which impoverished them by thou¬ sands of lives and millions of dollars; malaria bids fair to be conquered; typhoid fever, one may say, has disappeared from our armies and is being conquered in civil life.1 In the papers published in this volume, I have shown some of the victories which have been won. How has this marvelous progress been made? I answer, “By experi¬ ment.” Go back to my early professional life fifty years ago. Yellow fever, malaria, hospital gangrene, tetanus, and typhoid were national scourges. Only three ways are open to lessen or abolish these and other diseases: — 1. Try a new remedy or method or operation and try it first on man. God forbid! Yet Mrs. White, the most prominent Philadelphia anti- vivisectionist, is a pronounced advocate of human vivisec¬ tion.2 2. Try them first on the lower animals and then on man, provided that the trials on animals showed that they would be an improvement upon existing methods. If such trials on animals proved that they were ineffective or dan¬ gerous, then they would not be tried on man at all. 3. Try no experiments at all either on animals or man, that is to say, never make any progress. Remember that the least deviation from the usual prac¬ tice, whether in using a new drug or even a larger or a smaller dose, or in a different way, is an “experiment.” For instance, hypodermic injections, which were unknown till about fifty years ago; puncturing the spinal canal,—• “lumbar puncture,”—in order to make a diagnosis and later to inject a remedy, was unknown until a little over 1 See footnote, p. 260. 2 See text, pp. 251-253, and 254 and footnote,p. 252.