er scientific it may appear, it
is difficult to speak with restraint. To the average man or woman it
will probably seem that nothing more fiendish or cruel can be found
anywhere in the dark records of animal experimentation. Dr. Brachet
was no obscure or unexperienced vivisector. At one time he was the
professor of physiology in a medical school; he was a member of many
learned societies at home and abroad. But think of an educated man
procuring a little dog and deliberately putting out its eyes; then
breaking up the internal ear, so that for many days the animal must
have endured excruciating anguish from the inflammation thus induced;
next, when the pain had somewhat subsided, creating a sore on the back
by removal of the skin; and then, after comfortably seating himself in
his physiological laboratory by the side of his victim, scientifically
picking, and piercing, and pricking the wound, without respite--
constantly, without ceasing--until the blinded and deafened and
tortured creature is driven into frenzy by torments which it felt
continually, which it could not comprehend, and from which, by no
exertion, it was able to defend itself! Think of the scientist asking
many other learned men to join him from time to time in the
experiment, and to take part in picking at the wound, in tormenting
the mutilated and blinded victim, and in driving it again and again to
the madness of despair! Does anyone say that such an experiment could
not be made to-day? In one of the largest laboratories of America, and
within ten years, an experiment equally cruel, equally useless, has
been performed. The modern defender of unrestricted vivisection
distinctly insists that no legal impediment should hinder the
performance of any investigation desired by any experimenter. It was
the editor of the British Medical Journal who once declared that
"whoever has not seen an animal under experiment CANNOT FORM AN IDEA
OF THE HABITUAL PRACTICES OF THE VIVISECTORS."[1] This accords with
the statement of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, for forty years connected with
Harvard Medical School, that, aside from motives, painful vivisection
differed mainly from other phases of cruelty "in being practised by an
educated class, who, having once become callous to its objectionable
features, find the pursuit an interesting occupation, under the name
of Science."

[1] British Medical Journal, September 19, 1863 (leading editorial)

And this was the case of Brac