m
L'Union Me'dicale of Paris, suggesting distinctions that should be
made in the selection of vivisection material:

"Vivisection is often useful and sometimes necessary, and therefore
not to be absolutely proscribed; but I would gladly petition the
Senate to forbid its performance on every animal which is useful to,
and a friend of, man. The mutilations and tortures inflicted upon
dogs are horrible. The King of Dahomey is less barbarous than these
merciless vivisectors. HE cuts his victims' throats, but without
torturing them; while THEY tear and cut to pieces these wretched dogs
in their most sensitive parts. Let them operate on rats, foxes,
sharks, vipers, and reptiles. But no; our vivisectors object to the
teeth, the claws, the beaks of these repulsive animals; they must have
gentle animals; and so, like cowards, they seize upon the dog--that
caressing animal, which licks the hand, armed with the scalpel!"

Think of a such quotation in the columns of the British Medical
Journal--a periodical which to-day rarely ventures to criticize any
phase of animal experimentation.

The following summer, on August 22, 1863, the Journal find space in
its editorial pages for yet other quotations from French medical
periodicals concerning the "enormous abuses" of vivisection.

"We are very glad to find that the French medical journals are
entering protests against the cruel abuse which is made of vivisection
in France. L'Abeille Me'dicale says:

"`I am quite of you opinion as to the enormous abuses practised at the
present day in the matter of vivisection.... In the laboratories of
the College of France, in the E'cole de Me'decine, eminent professors,
placed at the head of instruction, are forced to the painful sacrifice
of destroying animals in order to widen the field of science. In doing
so they act legitimately, and suffering humanity demands it of them.
Those experiments are performed in the silence of private study, and
the results obtained are then explained to the pupils, or treated of
in publications.... But to repeat the experiments before the public,
to descend from the professional chair in order to practise the part
of a butcher or of an executioner, is painful to the feelings and
disgusting to the sentiments of the student.... Such public
exhibitions are ignoble, and of a kind which pervert the generous
sentiments of youth. An end should be put to them. Ought we to allow
the e'lite of our French youths