at the present day.[1]

[1] These figures have been compiled from the annual reports of the
Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England and
Wales. Each Annual Report furnishes the number of births and the
number of deaths from puerperal sepsis.

Nor is it true that recognition of the origin of this terrible disease
was due to experiments upon animals. It was Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, in America, who indicated, in 1843, the distasteful truth that
the medical attendant was chiefly responsible for the deaths from this
disease; and the great lights of the profession in Philadelphia made
him and his theory the butt of their ridicule and scorn. It was
Semmelweis, a young assistant in the Lying-in Hospital of Vienna, who
in 1847 pointed out the same truth, drawn, not from any experiments,
but from rational observation in the hospital wards; and his discovery
was received with contempt, he was hated and despised in his lifetime,
and he died, as an American author has phrased it, "with no other
reward than the scorn of his contemporaries." It was not by laboratory
experiments upon living animals that the methods by which this
terrible disease is transmitted became known to Science; it was common
sense in the sick-chamber that discerned its clue.

The decreased and decreasing mortality of tuberculosis is not
infrequently claimed as a triumph of vivisection; in the article in
Harper's Magazine to which reference has been made, it is intimated
that experimentation has reduced the mortality of tuberculosis "from
30 to 50 per cent.," by treatment springing from the discovery of
Koch.

Do facts support this assertion? On the contrary, the decline in the
mortality due to this dread destroyer of the human race BEGAN MORE
THAN A QUARTER OF A CENTURY BEFORE KOCH ANNOUNCED THAT DISCOVERY OF A
GERM which was the cause of the disease. In his report for 1907, the
Registrar-General of England and Wales tells us that "throughout the
last forty years there has been a steady decline in the fatality of
tuberculous diseases"; and he illustrates the figures by a diagram,
showing, for both men and women, the steady fall in the death-rate
from this disease from a period long before its bacillus was
recognized. Here are the exact figures for England and Wales:

ENGLAND AND WALES: AVERAGE ANNUAL DEATH-RATE FROM PHTHISIS PER MILLION
PERSONS LIVING, IN GROUPS OF YEARS.

For five years, 1850-1854 .. .. .. 2,811