t against the abuses of
vivisection was in course of an address delivered before the
Massachusetts Medical Society in 1871. It is not difficult, perhaps,
to detect the reason for its utterance. Dr. H. P. Bowditch, for very
many years afterward the professor of physiology in Harvard Medical
School, graduated in 1868 from that institution, and went abroad to
study physiology in Europe. There he remained about three years, and
on his return in 1871 he was given the opportunity of introducing
laboratory methods and all the newer processes of experimentation into
Harvard Medical School. Now, the address from which the following
extracts are taken was delivered on May 7, 1871. Perhaps the
inference is not an unreasonable one that Dr. Bigelow was here
protesting, and protesting in vain, against the introduction in
America of those methods of vivisection which he always regarded with
abhorrence and detestation.

In this address he says:

"The teacher of the art of healing has no more right to employ the
time of the ignorant student disproportionately in the pleasant and
seductive paths of laboratory experimentation--because some of these
may one day lead to pathology or therapeutics--than a guardian has to
invest the money of his ward in stocks or securities of equally
uncertain prospective value to him.

"How few facts of immediate considerable value to our race have of
late years been extorted from the dreadful sufferings of dumb animals,
the cold-blooded cruelties now more and more practised under the
authority of science!

"The horrors of vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the
thrilling fascination of the old unetherized operation upon the human
sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological
inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present value to
man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium,
perhaps to be confuted the next year, perhaps to remain a fixed truth
of immediate value,-- ... CONTEMPTIBLY SMALL COMPARED WITH THE PRICE
PAID FOR IT IN AGONY AND TORTURE.

"For every inch cut by one of these experimenters in the quivering
tissues of the helpless dog or rabbit or guinea-pig, let him insert a
lancet one-eighth of an inch into his own skin, and for every inch
more he cuts let him advance the lancet another one-eight of an inch;
and whenever he seizes, with ragged forceps, a nerve or spinal marrow,
the seat of all that is concentrated and exqui