perimentation says:

"How these experiments will be palliated and excused it is easy to
foretell. We shall undoubtedly be told that all this happened some
years ago; that the American soldiers, thus used as material suffered
no permanent injury from the experiments to which they were subjected;
that the investigators were purely disinterested; that the scientific
questions involved were of great interest and that results might
possibly have been obtained which would have proved of great service
to medical science. But even if we grant all this, and accord to
these gentlemen the purest of personal motives, can we say that in
such defence they touch the chief point at issue in this matter of
human vivisection? Here were a number of human beings who, for a brief
period, on account of misfortune, were temporarily in their power.
WHAT MORAL RIGHT had these medical gentlemen thus to experiment upon
the eye, the pulse, the brain of a single soldier of the Republic?
... Even granting the utility, who confers upon anyone the moral right
to test poisons on his fellow-men?

In his recent work, the author of "Animal Experimentation" refers to
these investigations of earlier years, and insists that most of the
patients thus operated on "were sorely in need of relief." What, he
asks, would his critics have had them do? "Sit idly by, and let these
poor fellows suffer torments, because if we tried various drugs we
were `experimenting' on human beings?" Is not this a little
disingenuous, in view of the very careful distinctions made by his
critic concerning the experiments performed for the relief of
suffering men? Assuredly, there was no objection to these; it was
regarding the "deliberate course of experiments," the "series of
experiments" made upon "MEN IN VERY FAIR HEALTH" that criticism was
suggested. Were all these experiments upon soldiers in the Army
hospital made for the relief of their pains? If so, they undoubtedly
deserve our warmest approval. Were any of a purely scientific
character, having no regard to the necessities of the individual upon
whom they were made? If so, we may leave the question of condemnation
or approval to the reader's judgment.

V.

What is the attitude of the author toward cruelty in animal
experimentation, or to the secrecy of the laboratory? So far as one
can see, there is no admission anywhere that vivisection ever
transcends the limits of what is entirely pe