ion, is early confronted by a curious fact. It is the
ignorance which generally prevails concerning the part borne by the
medical profession in exciting public attention to the cruelties of
experimentation. The present generation of scientific teachers, of
medical students and physicians, are as a rule profoundly ignorant of
the beginning of the controversy, and would be as surprised as
Professor Osler of Oxford University seems to have been surprised, to
hear that medical journals first made known to the world the abuses of
vivisection. Remembering how vigorously the physiological laboratory
of to-day resists and resents either investigation or criticism, one
is forced to confess that rarely, if ever, in the history of the world
has a transformation of ideals been more completely attained. If the
followers of Wilberforce and Clarkson, to whom the world is indebted
for the great impulse against negro slavery, were to-day organized for
the exploitation of the negroes on the Congo, or the Indians on the
Amazon, or for carrying on the slave-trade secretly, without
restriction or supervision, the condition of affairs could hardly be
more singular than the dominance obtained by the physiological
laboratory upon the medical conscience of to-day. The facts
constitute a remarkable chapter of human experience; and though once
before they have been stated by the present writer, it is evident, by
the evidence given before the Royal Commission, that a vast amount of
ignorance yet remains to be dispelled.

Up to a period considerably beyond the middle of the last century, the
sentiment of the medical profession in England was practically
unanimous in condemning the methods of vivisection which prevailed on
the Continent of Europe. In 1855 the science of bacteriology was
unknown. It is possible that not more than half a dozen English
physiologists at that time were making experiments on living animals.
It was not even regarded as an essential in the teaching of medical
schools. In 1875 some of the most distinguished surgeons and
physicians of Great Britain testified before the Royal Commission that
as medical students they had never witnessed an experiment on a living
animal.

That the agitation against the cruelties of vivisectors which made
itself evident during the last half of the previous century had no
origin in ignorance is easily demonstrated. It was the medical
journals of England which first made known to the wor