"; and no amount of literary juggling can prove that
whether the insensibility is complete or incomplete, the pain is
precisely the same.

THIRD. CURARE AND MORPHIA, NEITHER OF WHICH IS AN ANAESTHETIC, WERE
SOMETIMES USED IN THESE EXPERIMENTS, APPARENTLY TO PREVENT THE ANIMALS
UNDERGOING VIVISECTION FROM MAKING ANY MOVEMENTS WHICH MIGHT DISTURB
THE INSTRUMENTS EMPLOYED.

The use of CURARE rests upon the admission of the vivisector himself.
After mentioning the employment of chloroform and ether, as before
quoted, he adds: "In a few cases, CURARE and MORPHIA were used." Now,
these drugs are not anaesthetics, and curare especially is only used
when it is desired to keep the vivisected creature incapable of any
movement--no matter what degree of torment it may be suffering. In
his textbook on physiology, Professor Holmgren calls curare the "most
cruel of poisons," because an animal under its influence "it changes
instantly into a living corpse which hears and sees, and knows
everything, but is unable to move a single muscle; and under its
influence no creature can give the faintest indication of its hopeless
condition." Dr. Starling, the professor of physiology at University
College, London, states that when an animal has had an anaesthetic
administered and also a dose of CURARE, if the anaesthetic passed off,
the animal would be unable to move, or to show any sign of suffering.

Nor is morphia an anaesthetic. "So far from suppressing sensibility
completely," says Claude Be'rnard in his lectures, "morphine sometimes
seems to exaggerate it." An animal under its influence "FEELS THE
PAIN, BUT HAS LOST THE IDEA OF DEFENDING HIMSELF."

We should have been very glad if the author had stated in his book the
precise experiments in which curare and morphia were employed. We are
told that the number was "few." But in comparison with the total
number--146--how many may that phrase signify? Were there twenty?
Possibly. It would seem that in every case after the preliminary
administration of anaesthetics--the dog's throat was cut, so that
artificial respiration could be easily maintained; "tracheotomy was
performed," to use the scientific phraseology. This is done when
curare is given, for then not the slightest movement of the tortured
animal can disturb the delicate instruments which are attached to it.
We may therefore assume that every case wherein only curare and
morphia were used--how many there were we do not know--impl