History of the Antivivisection Movement (1912)

AUTHOR: White, Caroline Earle

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

This article provides a general history of the anti-vivisection movement in the US “during the last thirty years” (183). White traces the movement back to Frances Power Cobbe, reporting that the English Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested live experimentation at Alford, near Paris, as did “five hundred English veterinarians” (179), who signed an appeal. White then traces Cobbe's activism, including “the forming of the first Anti-vivisection Society that had ever existed” with Lord Shaftesbury in London (180). Inspired by the English society, the meetings she attended in London, and Cobbe's encouragement, White proceeded to found the first American society. Initially the American Anti-vivisection society campaigned on behalf of “a great modification of experimentation upon animals, but not for its entire abandonment” (181). She reports the failed attempt to formulate a “compromise Bill” on vivisection with doctors such as S. Weir Mitchell and Horatio C. Wood, who apparently sabotaged the agreement. While the society was initially called  “The American Society for the Restriction of Vivisection,” it was renamed “The American Anti-vivisection Society” to reflect the change in policy, with the society advocating for the “total abolition of all vivisectional experiments” (182). The society tirelessly “introduced Bills favoring our cause into the Pennsylvania Legislature, but … invariably lost them” (182). As an example, White provides the details of one attempt in which she represented the Society together with Mary S. Lovell. At the hearing they had to face seven distinguished members of the medical profession (again, including Weir and Wood).

White reports on the formation of anti-vivisection societies in cities such as Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York (182) and exhibitions organized by the society to represent "some of the cruelties of vivisectors, the maiming and crippling of the animals; the contrivances to fasten them down to boards and tables, so that, in spite of all their struggles, they could be kept nearly motionless, and the instruments of torture then used to cut and hack them in nearly every conceivable way” (183). She relates several attempts to engage prominent vivisectors in public discussion, and ends her account by pointing out that several famous vivisectors “regretted bitterly before their death the cruelties of which they had been guilty” (183).