VIVISECTION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume III, Issue 545, 27 January 1882, Page 2

VIVISECTION.

As a great many people, says a Home paper, will be told that Professor Perrier and Professor Yeo have between them been shown to have performed very cruel experiments upon monkeys and then left them lingering in their pain, and as the people who tell this side of the question will forget to add why all this was done, it may be worth while to supply the omission. For it would be a mistake to imagine that it is out of innate brutality that professors of medicine inflict pain on animals. Men are unfortunately subject to various welljknown painful and hitherto almost invjariably incurable disorders, such as washing of the limbs, partial paralysis, Ijoss of speech, epilepsy, and the like.j all of which are often suspected, nay, even known, to have their origin in an injury to, or disease of, the substance of the brain. Professor Perrier has been able to find by experiments upon animals, especially upon monkey;!;, that certain parts of the brain hftve to do with certain functions, and now that the brain is to a great extent mapped out, doctors can tell what spot in the brain it is that is affected. For instance, to take an unpublished case. A man came to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital showing symptoms epilepsy and of disorder in the right arm, which indicated something wrong at p. certain spot on the left side of the prain. He was asked if he could remember a blow on that side at any time. | He could not. The physician felt dbout the skull. There was certainly an indentation just where there might be expected ito be one. “ What is this ? ” “ Oh, T was kicked by a horse in Buenos ; Ayres nine years ago.” There was themischief. But it would not have been much use to know where the seat of the mischief lay, if one could not get at it. Here, again, Professor Ferrieii’s experiment steps in. By practising on monkeys it has been discovered;—as it could not have been otherwise, for no one would dare to experiment on human lives—that the skull can be safely opened where necessary, the brain abscess or other trouble relieved; and the wound so made dressed and healed, and the patient cured. |So it was in this case. So it is now ;nearly every day, and we are yet in the infancy of the matter. And that is Professor Perrier’s justification for anything he may have been privy to with respect to the monkeys : .