Dr. Lawson Tait
Why I Oppose Vivisection
「1896-Aug」Dr. Lawson Tait, “Why I Oppose Vivisection, no. XIII,” Animals’ Friend 2 「Google Books」2(1896 Aug): 185-189.
Dr. Tait in “Why I Oppose Vivisection” maintains that “no great advance in medicine or surgery has been made which could not have been gained by clinical observation.”
In this article, he illustrates “the uselessness and the positive danger of experiments on animals”
from personal observations and experience.
IT is now nearly a quarter of a century since I was startled into a review of my own work on the surgery of the arteries, and led to the humiliating recognition of the fact that the conclusions obtained from a series of experiments on animals could not be applied to man, and that our efforts to adapt them were leading us into serious surgical blunders. An extended investigation into which I was further attracted by the rising discussion of this question forced upon me the opinion that Syme and Fergusson were right when they stoutly asserted that surgery had in no way been advanced by experiments on animals.
It seems to me a rank discredit that we have to plead a necessity for vivisection in any case. It is so transparently unscientific, that is inexact. Let my brethren bear in mind that this method of research after knowledge, be it useful or be it useless, stands absolutely alone in being objectionable to every one. Not the astronomer, nor the chemist, nor the physicist, nor any one else among scientific men has had to defend or excuse any one of his methods of research.
WHY I OPPOSE VIVISECTION. No. XIII.—BY LAWSON TAIT F.R.C.S., ENG. AND ED., M.D. AND LL.D. HONORIS CAUSA, ETC., ETC., CONSULTING SURGEON TO THE BIRMINGHAM HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN, ETC., ETC.
IT is now nearly a quarter of a century since I was startled into a review of my own work on the surgery of the arteries, and led to the humiliating recognition of the fact that the conclusions obtained from a series of experiments on animals could not be applied to man, and that our efforts to adapt them were leading us into serious surgical blunders. An extended investigation into which I was further attract
ed by the rising discussion of this question forced upon me the opinion that Syme and Fergusson were right when they stoutly asserted that surgery had in no way been advanced by experiments on animals.
I knew these two men intimately, and all who knew them at all must have recognized the fact that they would not by choice agree on an opinion which placed them outside the boundaries of general professional belief. They differed wherever they could, and very heartily expressed their differences. They were the two greatest surgeons I have ever known.
The opinions first enunciated by them, and entirely shared by me, have since their time slowly percolated through the profession, and will some day soon be completely recognized by the whole body officially. This is quite evident from casual conversations I have had with many members of my profession who have given the matter serious thought, and who are not influenced merely by professional traditions and by the assertions of the small band of their brethren whose positions drive them into the belief that “there is nothing like leather.” Let it be borne in mind that for years back the favourite method of gaining the coveted letters “F.R.S.” for use after a medical name has been the “physiological research,” and that the governing influence in the Royal Society has been the biological school. These letters formerly had a distinct commercial value in the medical profession and were much sought after, but circumstances have fortunately altered, and now they are not so anxiously desired by assistant physicians and assistant surgeons to metropolitan hospitals, whilst in the provinces they have absolutely ceased to be noteworthy. This has, however, still to be said, as it might have been said any time this last twenty years, that any one holding the views I do on the subject of experiments on animals might as well stand for the Presidentship of the United States as for the Fellowship of the Royal Society—and of this no secret is made.
Further evidence of change in the attitude of the great body of the medical profession is to be seen in a leading article in the foremost medical journal, from which I take the following sentences:—
Lancet, November. 26th, 1892:—“It is daily becoming more and more evident that the question to be determined is—how much good has been done, and how much information has been obtained by experiments on living animals. Of course even anti-vivisectionists disagree on this matter, but to Mr. Lawson Tait’s credit must be placed the fact that he has accepted this as being the real point at issue. He maintains that no great advance in medicine or surgery has been made which could not have been gained by clinical observation. It is quite conceivable that there may be a grain of truth in this statement…
“The questions to be discussed are:—I. Are experiments on animals justified by the results obtained ? II. Are such experiments carried on under proper restrictions and by qualified and humane investigators in this country ?
…“Mr. Tait is a keen, we might almost say an obstinate controversialist, but an able surgeon, and we hope ere long we may hear that he has re-read his evidence, and has been convinced that there is some good in vivisection.”
I take the following sentences from a letter in the Lancet of December 3rd, 1892, commenting on the leading article quoted above:—
“Your article deserves thanks, not contention. You are kind enough to say that I am a keen, perhaps an obstinate controversialist, and that you hope I 「187」 may be ere long convinced that there is some good in vivisection. Would you be surprised to hear that I have admitted as much long ago, and who could doubt it after the masterly (no word is too good for it) unravelling of the sardine poisoning case the other day by Dr. Stevenson? This prince of toxicologists ‘vivisected’ some mice and guinea-pigs, and proved his case; but with it all there is a suspicion in my mind that if modern chemistry would give itself up to such work seriously, that splendid science could prove the presence of these mysterious poisons in a way far better than that of trusting to the random mediæval method of poisoning mice and guinea-pigs. The spectroscope solved in a trice, the other day, the mystery of the ‘winking’ star for the astronomer. Is not the possibility of sardine poisoning, open to all and any of us, a far more important matter than the size and shape of the orbit of Algol? It seems to me a rank discredit that we have to plead a necessity for vivisection in any case. It is so transparently unscientific, that is inexact. Let my brethren bear in mind that this method of research after knowledge, be it useful or be it useless, stands absolutely alone in being objectionable to every one. Not the astronomer, nor the chemist, nor the physicist, nor any one else among scientific men has had to defend or excuse any one of his methods of research. Is it not time that we began to at least apologise for this bète noire of ours? Not to defend it, but to express sorrow that our methods are so primitive, our science so crude, that it is still necessary—if it really is so. Further, should we not say that we regret it; should we not undertake to restrict it as far as possible, and keep it out of the horrors of the past as much as we can? And then should we not religiously and zealously move to replace it by better methods, and exhaust all other methods first?
Even these protestations—and the bulk of us would be honest in them—would go a long way to keep moderate minded men on our side, but to make an all-round defence of everything that has been done is mere folly. “LAWSON TAIT.”
In an address delivered to the students of St. Thomas’s Hospital by Sir Edwin Arnold, that distinguished authority on matters of humanity attacked the Vivisection question and, inter alia, spoke thus:—
“But as regards my own sentiments, that which chiefly led me to write the Light of Asia was the boundless and beautiful tenderness of the Buddhist religion towards the lower animals, whose lives are so mysteriously related to our own, whose lot is so largely at our disposal, and who are to us much as we human beings are to that invisible almighty power, at the feet of which we have sometimes too little cause to wonder if we ask in vain for pity and clemency. Therefore I will be bold enough to-day to put in this humble plea for the dumb martyrs of vivisection, that they may be as few as possible, as mercifully dealt with as possible, and that it be held by the inner religio medici which every true doctor cannot but possess and profess, that the meanest living thing thus sentenced to suffer and to perish for mankind derives from its very doom a certain enhanced regard and a special consideration to which the conscience of him, who is a gentleman as well as a doctor, will never be insensible.”
—British Medical Journal, October 12th, 1895.
The Editor of this journal is a Mr. Ernest Abraham Hart, a Hebrew with a past, and his rancour on the subject of the anti-vivisection movement in all its various phases, and his animosity towards those who support the movement in any way, has been most remarkable, even amongst those of his race who are noted, as Miss Cobbe has pointed out, for their support and their practice of vivisectional research. His present views indicate a most satisfactory modification of his past, so far as they go.
Commenting on Sir Edwin Arnold’s address, the Editor of the British Medical Journal characterizes his utterances as “wise and eloquent,”
and concedes to the full one of our most strenuous contentions in the following passage (ib. p. 915):—
“Next as regards experiments on animals, we agree with him (Sir Edwin Arnold) that these should be as few as possible ; that every possible precaution should be taken to avoid the inflicting of pain; and that the use of such experiments should be allowed to those alone who are thoroughly qualified to make them…We agree, also, with Sir Edwin Arnold that any experiment on animals should be made with a grave sense of responsibility, and, as it were, 「188
」under compulsion; we believe that in England this is the spirit in which they are made.”
So far as it goes, we may be satisfied with this conversion of Mr. Ernest Abraham Hart, and I for one shall persistently endeavour to win all such over to a full acceptance of the truth.
For the sake of him, and such as him, let me give two more illustrations of the uselessness and the positive danger of experiments on animals for the purpose of applying conclusions for the treatment of human diseases.
Some few years ago I began to deal with one of the most dreadful calamities to which humanity is subject, by means of an operation which had been scientifically proposed nearly two hundred years ago, but had never been carried out—I allude to the accident of ectopic gestation. The rationale of the proposed operation was fully explained about fifty years ago, but the whole physiology of the normal process and the pathology of the perverted one were obscured and misrepresented by a French physiologist’s experiments on rabbits and dogs. Nothing was done, and at least 95 per cent of the victims of this catastrophe had to die.
I went outside the experimentalists’ conclusions, went back to the true science of the old pathologist and of the surgeon of 1701, and performed the operation in scores of cases with almost uniform success. My example was immediately followed throughout the world, and during the last five or six years hundreds if not thousands of women’s lives have been saved, whilst for nearly forty years the simple road to this gigantic success was closed by the folly of a vivisector.
But that is not all. One of the conclusions of my operations was a physiological one, as simple as possible, and following from my facts as certainly as night follows day. It was that the peritoneal cavity was capable of digesting the soft gelatinous tissue of an early fetus. But this did not satisfy our German men of science, one of whom immediately set to work and, removing the immature babies from the wombs of a number of animals, he planted them in the cavity of the peritoneum of the same animals. Thus he assumed that he “confirmed” my statements.
I shall not harrow your readers by a description of what the sufferings of these poor little animals must have been, because I do not take up (though I feel very keenly) what is called the mere sentiment of this question ; but I proclaim that the whole of this objectionable proceeding was useless and ridiculous in its purport, for ectopic gestation is unknown in the lower animals, and therefore no conclusion derived from this German kind of science could have been of the least value. But, on the other hand, suppose that the peritoneum of these lower and fur-clothed animals had not been capable of digesting the fetus, for animals differ vastly from man in these processes, these experiments might have created doubts as to the value of my operations on women, and the whole of this immense advance of surgery might have been stopped—a possible result really too awful to contemplate.
The establishment of anæsthesia by Simpson in 1847-8 let loose a flood of surgical advances, from which we have not even yet derived the full benefit. The great realm of abdominal surgery has grown out of it immediately. The first and greatest apostle, Isaac Baker Brown, started his work in 1851, and brought about the great improvement in the operations of ovariotomy of what is known as the intraperitoneal treatment of the pedicle. This he did by cooking the pedicle, by means of a clamp and hot irons till he stopped the bleeding. Years after, and after he had successfully dealt with scores of cases in this way, his treatment and methods were adopted in their entirety by Thomas Keith, of Edinburgh, who used them without alteration of any kind up to the time of his retirement from practice—a period of nearly thirty years. After Keith’s death a claim was made by his son, Dr. Skene Keith, that his father had discovered the explanation of his success by some experiments on animals (Lancet, June 21st, 1896), and to that claim I made the following reply:—
THOMAS KEITH AND THE CAUTERY.
To the Editors of the “Lancet.”
SIRS,—There is only one intelligible statement in Dr. Skene Keith’s letter, to the effect that his father made some experiments on animals to prove something「189」 or other about the cautery. This is the first we have heard of the circumstances. Keith took the cautery from Baker Brown first, as the latter had used it for years before Keith operated. Keith used it in the same way for over thirty years without ever suggesting modification or improvement. It therefore follows that whatever Keith may have proved by experiments on animals had been already completely proved by Baker Brown on the human body. Keith’s experiments on animals were, therefore, absolutely useless and unnecessary. If the facts are as Dr. Skene Keith states it would have been better for his father’s memory, if he had said nothing about them, as nobody ever suspected Thomas Keith of such egregious folly.
I am, sir, yours faithfully, LAWSON TAIT.* The Crescent, Birmingham, June 22nd, 1896.
Here, then, ends the last, up to date, of claims made for the advancement of surgery by experiments on animals. The concluding illustration is a grim fiasco, for it leaves Dr. Skene Keith on the horns of a terrible dilemma—either his father concealed from his profession for thirty years knowledge which he was bound to impart to them, a professional crime of the most serious kind, or Dr. Skene Keith’s statement is a mere invention. Which horn does he choose?
The fundamental objection on my own part to experiments on animals was derived at that time when, my eyes being opened, I adopted views such as are here enthroned as my apologia. Like Sir Edwin Arnold, I have been greatly influenced by the teaching of Buddha, and in the particular question of the rights of the lower animals and our duties to them I decide altogether against Vivisection, because it is inherently objectionable from my religious point of view, because it is clumsy and inexact, and because it has very frequently, if indeed it has not always, been found altogether misleading.
Birmingham, July 14th, 1896.
Lawson Tait
* This letter remains unanswered, July 23rd, 1896.—L.T.
