5, Questions 3,538, 3540.

Unrestricted vivisection is the same to-day as a century ago. In many
cases its operations involve little or no pain; in many cases there
seems to be the same absolute indifference to the agony inflicted that
was manifested by the vivisectors of a hundred years since. Where the
law does not interfere, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. Whether there is
cruelty or consideration depends on the spirit of the vivisector. It
was no ignorant layman, but the president of the American Academy of
Medicine, who, in his annual address, declared that there were
American vivisectors who "seem, seeking useless knowledge, to be blind
to the writhing agony and deaf to the cry of pain of their victims,
AND WHO HAVE BEEN GUILTY OF THE MOST DAMNABLE CRUELTIES, without the
denunciation of the public and the profession that their wickedness
deserves."[1] And that vivisector of to-day, who suggests that if
anaesthetics had been known to Magendie or Brachet, they would
invariably have been used, is either ignorant or insincere. Surely he
must know that the very nature of their experiments precluded the use
of ether, and that in their time, as to-day, if the experiment were to
be tried at all, it was necessary that the pain be felt.

[1] Address before American Academy of Medicine at Washington, D.C.,
May 4, 1891, by Theophilus Parvin, M.D., LL.D., professor in Jefferson
Medical College of Philadelphia, Pa.

There are other reasons why we should not permit the past to be
forgotten. We are confronted by the challenge of the laboratory.
Behind the locked and barred doors of the vivisection chamber, to
which no man can gain admission unless known to be friendly to its
practices, the vivisector of to-day challenges society to prove the
existence of cruelty or abuse. The vivisector demands absolute
freedom of action, he demands the most complete privacy, he demands
total independence of all legal supervision--and then challenges the
production of proof that any criticism is justified! Within the sacred
precincts of the laboratory a Brachet, a Magendie, a Claude Be'rnard
may be experimenting to-day with a profusion of victims, protected by
their seclusion from every possibility of complaint. For in what
respect does the spirit that animates research to-day differ from that
manifested by experimenters of the past? In all the literature of
advocacy for unrestricted vivisection can one point out a word of
criticism of Magendi