arking the beginning of criticism, he refers again to the views of
Abernethy:

"As for experiments on living animals involving suffering,
Mr. Abernethy disapproved of them, and seldom alluded to them but in
terms of distrust, derision, or disgust."

That the criticism of experimental cruelty did not begin in 1864, as
imagined by Professor Bowditch, the quotations here given sufficiently
demonstrate.

Beyond this demonstration, does the history of these savage tormentors
have any lesson for us to-day? They belonged to another century.
Should they not be forgiven, and their experiments condoned? Why not
confine attention solely to the laboratory of to-day? Why blame
Brachet and Magendie and Spallanzani, to whom anaesthesia was unknown?

There is a false suggestion in this protest, which, in one form or
another, we hear often to-day. It is the gratuitous assumption put
forth in defence, that if anaesthetics had only been known to
physiologists before 1846, they would invariably have been used. Any
such suggestion is manifestly false. If these experiments of Brachet
and of others to be mentioned were to be made at all, it was necessary
that the animal should be conscious of the agony it experienced. In
the most complete laboratory for vivisection of the present time--in
the Rockefeller Institute, for example--no scientist could drive a dog
INTO A FRENZY while it lies absolutely unconscious under the influence
of chloroform! We may say this of the experiments of Magendie on the
nervous system, for aside from the preliminary cutting operation, such
experiments demanded the consciousness of the victim. That which
humanity has a right to censure in these physiologists is the spirit
of absolute indifference to animal suffering, the willingness to
subject a living creature to agony without adequate reason for the
infliction of pain. The discovery of chloroform or ether made no
change in human nature. Some of the worst of vivisections have been
made, not merely since anaesthetics were discovered, but within the
present century. Over twenty-five years after the properties of ether
had been discovered, the most prominent vivisector in England told the
Royal Commission that, except for teaching purposes, "I never use
anaesthetics where it is not necessary for convenience, " and that an
experimenter "HAD NO TIME, SO TO SPEAK, FOR THINKING WHAT THE ANIMAL
WILL FEEL OR SUFFER."[1]

[1] Evidence before Royal Commission, 187