An Answer to Dr. Keen's Address (1886)

AUTHOR: White, Caroline Earle

This anti-vivisection pamphlet is addressed to “the Graduates at the Twenty-third Commencement of the Woman 's Medical College of Pennsylvania” (3), to whom Professor William Williams Keen had spoken about the benefits of vivisection. White addresses the graduates as a fellow woman who is “interested ... in the advancement of true science, and in the progress of the human race” (3). She is a co-founder of “the American Society for the Restriction of Vivisection,” and someone who has “given this subject of experimentation upon animals careful and serious study, reading without reserve both sides of the question” (3). White takes issue with both Keen's premise that vivisection is necessary to the advancement of medicine and his utilitarian argument that the infliction of pain on a few animals is justifiable to save many thousands of both animals and humans from suffering.

The first point White makes is that talk of pain is euphemistic because vivisection is, in fact, “torture” (4). She does not “object to the slaying of animals, when by so doing we can derive undoubted benefit for mankind.” She does, however, object to torturing them, which is “a far greater evil than death.” She points out that the mention of a “few animals” in fact refers to “millions.” White does not accept the argument that vivisection cannot be performed on humans, writing that, to the contrary “no important deductions can ever be drawn, with any degree of certainty, from experiments upon animals, since in some inexplicable way their construction is so different from that of man” (4). In fact, the results are often misleading, so that progress is made despite vivisection, not because of it.

White adduces supporting evidence from the writings of a number of physiologist, giving detailed accounts of a series of experiments that she deems unnecessary or fallacious, including the inconclusive testing of various “drugs and poisons” on animals (6), the alleged “improvement in the treatment of gunshot wounds in the abdomen” derived from shooting dogs (7), brain surgery performed on monkeys (12), and “experiments upon guinea pigs with the virus of yellow fever” (15). White launches a lengthy attack on so-called “Listerism,” “the vaunted discoveries of Sir Joseph Lister” (16), and Louis Pasteur's  “experiments with the attenuated virus of rabies” (17). The latter, she describes as follows:

Its efficacy lasts a very short time – only a few days – so that it is always necessary to have a succession of dogs inoculated with rabies, in order to obtain fresh virus. It is also necessary to have a constant succession of either rabbits or monkeys, with their skulls opened and the virus injected therein, in order to obtain the necessary attenuation. An adoring disciple of Pasteur, visiting his laboratory, gives this description of it: “Isolated in round and well-secured cages are the mad dogs. Some of them are already at the stage of furious madness – biting the bars, devouring hay and uttering those dismal howls which no one can forget who has once heard them. Other dogs are still in the incubating period, and still caressing, with soft eyes, imploring a kind look.”

Does not this seem too painful a method of obtaining exemption from hydrophobia for the human race, in view of the fact that the disease is so rare that it is said that one hundred deaths occur from lightning to one from hydrophobia, and of those who are bitten by mad dogs only twenty out of every hundred are likely to have the disease (18).

Having argued against the alleged usefulness of vivisection, in the concluding pages of her pamphlet White turns to “the objections that can be made to Vivisection in a moral point of view,” and “the almost indescribable barbarities which are the natural result of unchecked experimentation upon animals” (21). Examples of such “barbarities” include the deliberate starving and torturing of rabbits and guinea pigs, the setting on fire and scalding with boiling water of dogs, the introduction of a hot iron into the brain of a dog, and the tying up of the bile ducts of cats (21-23). White writes that she spares her readers the most gruesome  “experiments, such as those upon the nerves” as they are “too painful” to describe (23). “What, then,” White asks, “do you suppose, must be the effect of such cruelties upon the moral nature of those who practice them?” (23). To White, the answer is obvious: wholesale “demoralization” and “moral deterioration” (24). 

The pamphlet ends with a rallying cry asking readers to join the “battle against the enemies of Mercy and Humanity,” specifically in lobbying for “a law that will render impossible such scenes as may to-day be witnessed in the laboratories of nearly every part of the civilized world – scenes so atrociously cruel that they would disgrace a Sodom or Gomorrah – a law that will, in short, put a stop to the abuses of Vivisection” (24).