The Fallacious Claims of Benefits Arising from Vivisection (1899)

AUTHOR: White, Caroline Earle

This paper was originally read “at the opening of the convention of the American Humane Association, at Washington D. C., Wednesday, December 15th,” arguing against the claim that, due to vivisection, “the average of human life has been increased more than ten years” (8). White attributes this increase to better quality clothing that provides better “protection against damp and coldness” and progress in dentistry (8). She draws on the work of Lawson Tait and a number of other physicians and surgeons to debunk Listerism, the “antiseptic treatment” by means of a “spray of carbolic acid” in surgery (8), that has been derived from animal experimentation.

She claims that “[t]he fallacy of Pasteur's claim to preventing hydrophobia by his inoculations of matter obtained from animals previously rendered rabid has been so often shown that it seems idle for us again to attempt it” (9). She speaks out against “bacteriology” because its adherents “are experimenting all over the civilized world upon unfortunate animals” (9). White is convinced that “the beneficial results of the anti-toxin treatment” are exaggerated and that, on the contrary, “it is apt to do harm” (9). She provides anecdotal evidence of its shortcomings and negative effects but concedes that the question of its usefulness is simply “not settled” (10). Even if inoculation by means of anti-toxins eventually proves to be beneficial, given that it has been in use for only a short time it cannot have caused an increase in longevity and vivisection cannot be credited with directly contributing to it. She points out that “mortality from the usual diseases” has not decreased at all (10) – which should be the case if vivisection had been effective.

Ultimately, the “extreme cruelty” of vivisection “toward thousands of helpless creatures” simply cannot “be defended in a moral point of view” (10). Paraphrasing Stephen Coleridge, White maintains that “even if life could be prolonged by the torturing of animals, life prolonged by so base and terrible a means was of necessity deprived of all nobility which alone made it worth having” (10). For White, it is impossible to “imagine for a moment that if the torture of human beings is wrong, as is now universally admitted all over the civilized world, that torture of the lower animals is right” (10). Those who promote vivisection in the name of “the idol, which they call Science” are immoral, inhuman, and un-Christian (11).