... and in another series of observations."[A]

[A] "A Text-Book of Human Physiology." By Austin Flint, Jr.
M. D. New York, 1876. Page 589; see also page 674.

This is the experience of a single professional teacher; but it is
improbable that this experiment has been shown only to the students of
a single medical college in the United States; it has doubtless been
repeated again and again in different colleges throughout the country.
If Englishmen are, then, so extremely sensitive as Ferrier, Gull, and
Burdon-Sanderson would have us believe, we must necessarily conclude
that the sentiment of compassion is far greater in Britain than in
America. Have we drifted backward in humanity? Have American students
learned to witness, without protest, tortures at the sight of which
English students would rebel? We are told that there is no need of any
public sensitiveness on this subject. We should trust entirely, as
they do in France,--at Alfort, for example,--"to the judgment of the
investigator." There must be no lifting of the veil to the outside
multitude; for the priests of this unpitying science there must be as
absolute immunity from criticism or inquiry as was ever demanded
before the shrine of Delphi or the altars of Baal. "Let them exercise
their solemn office," demands Dr. Wilder, "not only unrestrained by
law, but upheld by public sentiment."

For myself, I cannot believe this position is tenable. Nothing seems
to me more certain than the results that must follow if popular
sentiment in this country shall knowingly sustain the public
demonstration of an experiments in pain, which can find no defender
among the physiologists of Great Britain. It has been my fortune to
know something of the large hospitals of Europe; and I confess I do
not know a single one in countries where painful vivisection
flourishes, unchecked by law, wherein the poor and needy sick are
treated with the sympathy, the delicacy, or even the decency, which so
universally characterize the hospitals of England. When Magendie,
operating for cataract, plunged his needle to the bottom of his
patient's eye, that he might note upon a human being the effect
produced by mechanical irritation of the retina, he demonstrated how
greatly the zeal of the enthusiast may impair the responsibility of
the physician and the sympathy of man for man.

III. The utility of vivisection in advancing therapeutics, despite
much argument, still remains an open que