HUMAN VIVISECTION.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 9, 24 January 1905, Page 7 (Supplement)

HUMAN VIVISECTION.

Or is it murder? When it results in death, and it generally docs, it is properly described as murder. The vivisection of animals has long given rise to much opposition and strong condemnation. But so far from the practice having been stifled under the invective of the anti-vivisection-istp, it would appear to have thriven. It is a big step from the inoculation of rabbits to the inoculation of human beings, but the gulf has apparently been crossed by certain European “scientists.” Dr. Veresaeff, in his “Confessions of a Physician,” gives some horrible details of socalled scientific experiments. He tolls of medical men inoculating with deadly cultures dozens of helpless patients, who are conveniently described as “hopeless cases” —mostly consumptives. One brute, who believed he had succeeded in procuring a pure culture of Neisser’s gonococci, for the sole purpose of proving whether he had the right thing or not, inoculated four paralytic patients and a young lunatic, and, killing all of them, proved that his culture was satisfactory. If this was not murder it is difficult to say what it was. Paralytics often live as long as sound people, and in any case the medical man is not yet born who can say whether or when a lunatic will recover. Similar experiments were made with the same material by three other ogres who inoculated fourteen patients, alleged hopeless cases, all of whom died in from three to eight days after the crime was committed. Ono devil found experience and, doubtless, pleasure, in putting helpless babies to death. He inoculated the eyes of infants who, he alleges, could not have lived in ' any case, with the inflammatory secretions

of gonorrhoeic patients, and found, seemingly to his satisfaction, that the helpless little mites died within a few days of the crime. How many plain men would call this science, we wonder? How many would prefer to write it down as the worst form of murder? There are dozens of instances given in this remarkable book, but nowhere is there mention of one of these men experimenting on himself. This is a double pity. In the first place the experimenter would get actual personal experience; in the second place the world would be rid of him. Syphilis is an hereditary disease which will linger in innocent blood for generations, and yet we are told that sores on the feet of six patients wore smeared with the blood of a syphilitic pati?nt, with the result that three of them were given that horrible, lingering disease! Where was the gain to science here? Any Sixth Standard schoolboy could have predicted what would happen. But three sufferers were, presumably, not sufficient, so the number inoculated was raised to twenty-three, and the tale of sufferers to seventeen. And w» are assured that all this was done “without infringing the laws of humanity.” To which amazing assertion one can only answer that it must lie a very low class of humanity among which it is possible. To all the above “experiments,” except the last, the name of the performing criminal is given, but one is not surprised to learn that the name of the author of the last atrocity never transpired. After “experiments” of this quality we are not surprised to read of tests made with healthy soldiers in Russian military hospitals, such as the injection of the blood of typhoid patients into healthy men, the placing of others in wards with typhoid patients, and the putting of others in the unwashed beds of typhoid patients. What strikes the English reader in the practices of this particular Continental school of medicine is the low moral fibre of the men who could l>e guilty of them. We have called them criminals, and we have done so intentionally. A criminal is a human being of low moral fibre and evil tendencies, and if these experimenters do not come in this category, there is certainly no other class of human being with whom they can be ranked. What increases the horror of their misdeeds tenfold is the fact that they have satisfied their lust upon those who have gone to them in the hope of benefiting and have put themselves in their hands in full reliance on their skill and honour. If for no other reason, their so-cailed scientific investigations are rendered utterly worthless and contemptible by the fact that they have l>een and can only bo carried out with the aid of the vile trinity of auxiliaries —lying, deceit, and broken faith.