edical
school in Dublin, denounced the experiments at the time they were made
as unjustifiably cruel. Public attention was beginning to be aroused;
it was decided to test the question, whether such exhibitions were
protected by English law, and a prosecution was instituted against
some who had assisted in performing the experiments. Dr. Tufnell
appeared to testify in regard to the cruelty of the exhibition, and
Sir William Fergusson, surgeon to the Queen, who had only just retired
from the presidency of the British Medical Association, not only
stigmatized one of the experiments as "an act of cruelty," but
declared that "such experiments would not be of the smallest possible
benefit."[1] The magistrates decided that while the case was a very
proper one to prosecute, yet the gentlemen named as defendants were
not sufficiently proven to have taken part in the experiment. The
decision was not unjust; the real offender was safe in his native
land.

[1] British Medical Journal, December 12, 1874.

It is not my purpose to trace the course of the English agitation
against vivisection, except as it may be seen in the medical
literature of the time; but one cannot refer to this period without
mention of the name of Frances Power Cobbe. In 1863, while in Italy,
she had protested, and not in vain, against the cruelties of Professor
Schiff in Florence. Taking up the question again in 1874, she devoted
the remainder of her life to the advancement of her ideals of reform.
It was to her zeal that in 1875 was founded the "Society for the
Protection of Animals liable to Vivisection." At this period, then,
three phases of opinion opposed one another; first, the
antivivisectionists, who desired the total suppression by law of all
animal experimentation; second, the physiological enthusiasts, few in
number, but favourable to the introduction of the Continental
irresponsibility, and eager to free vivisection from every semblance
of restraint; and, thirdly, the great body of Englishmen and of the
medical profession, whose views we have seen reflected in medical
journals of the day. The popular attack upon all animal
experimentation became so pressing that for a time the entire medical
profession seemed to unite in its defence; and editorial space once
filled with denunciation of vivisection in France was now given over
to criticism of the antivivisectionists of England. Yet, even at this
period, there appeared no repudiation of tho