Evidence of Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton before the Royal Commission on Vivisection, Wednesday, 24th July, 1907.

  • Moulton, John Fletcher Moulton, 1st baron, 1844-1921.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Evidence of Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton before the Royal Commission on Vivisection, Wednesday, 24th July, 1907. 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.

    24/84 (page 22)
    will be struck in another way, and there will be a jjerpetual conflict as to which is the true explanation. Bat when you take sucli an experiment, there is not a doubt; you cannot explain it, except that the disease is communicable. And the consequence is that you commence your further examination with the conscious- ness that it has been demonstrated that it can pass from the sick to the well. Now I was very much struck—as illustrating the impossibility of arriving at these things by observation—by a piece of cross-examination by Sir William Collins of one of the witnesses before the Com- mission ; it illustrated it in the most striking way. He was dealing with the result of the serum treatment of diphtheria. An appeal was made to the statistics of diphtheria hospitals in London, and the witness said : “ Oh, the serum treatment is being demonstrated as being a great success, because you have here the same hospital in the same place dealing for a consecutive number of years with the same population, and the statistics show a great diminution of the percentage of deaths after the introduction of the serum treatment.” Sir William Collins, if I might say so, quite justifiably cross-examined on that. He will know whether I am fairly representing him, but, as I remember it, he asked are we now getting the cases earlier; is it not true that we have made such advances in the diagnosis that we know better what is diphtheria and what is not? And he went on pointing to differences in the circumstance of the earlier years and the later years as taking away from the conclusiveness of the statistics. 12716. {Sir William Collins.) As an element that required con.sideration.—Exactly, as an element that required consideration. That is perfectly fair. Stat- istics that are got in that way must be rightly open to