p. 9 | SCIENCE GONE MAD

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 22, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 25.

SCIENCE GONE MAD.

The readers of this paper will remember that some time ago an article was published in these columns showing something of the terrible sufferings inflicted on animals by vivisectors. It was shown that many of these experiments were carried on for the simple curiosity of seeing how the animals would behave under the torture that was inflicted upon them; that these brutal exhibitions were attended by persons who could have no other object in view than the gratification of a morbid curiosity, a depraved desire to see the torture, hear the cries of the animals, and see their contortions under the common acts of the pain-producers. That thousands of animals of different species are thus tortured to death under the most excruciating torment is a matter of general knowledge; but it has not been so generally known that human beings have been and are being put through a similar course of cruel and criminal experimentation. True, they are not strapped down and dissected while still living, as the animals are; but they are being inoculated with the most virulent diseases against their will, and generally without their knowledge, and all for no other purpose than to study the effect of the inoculation.

So prevalent has this practise become in the Old World, that doctors believing in human vivisection, and practising it, are not allowed on the medical staffs of children's hospitals lest the physicians turn these institutions into laboratories of human vivisection. Children's hospitals become rich pastures for the heartless vivisector when he is permitted to practise there.

That this work is not confined to the Old World, is shown by the report of Rev. Herbert Ward, before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, in which he describes experiments on forty pauper children, in the very language of the physician (mis-named) who performed them. This report was given in the effort to have a law passed to prevent the continuance of the practise. One medical man, who is professor of chemistry in the University of Wyoming, states the position of the human vivisectors in the following language:—

The Humane Society seems to think that the aim of science is the cure of disease, the saving of human life. Quite the contrary; the aim of science is the advancement of human knowledge at any sacrifice of human life. If cats and guinea pigs can be put to any higher use than to advance science, we do not know what it is. We do not know of any other use to put a man to.

The study of science in the hands of such men is a dangerous business. We may be sure that those who consider science of more consequence than human life will not be slow to take human life for the advancement of science; and they will find ways of doing it so that they will not endanger their own lives in the process. The increase of this doctrine in the land may account for the large number of capital operations performed by science-loving surgeons. It is a fact that many diseases which were formerly treated by the simpler remedies, are now given over to the lancet and the scalpel; that surgeons, especially young surgeons, eager to make a record for themselves, find cases for operation which formerly were never touched by the knife. And this is but vivisection under another name, only in this case the patient pays dearly for the operation, and very likely continues to pay for it through all his life.

The heartlessness of those who admit the practise of human vivisection is well shown in the reports of some of these cruel experimenters, two of which we give, tho we have many others on file. Dr. Jansen, of the Charity Hospital in Stockholm, in a lecture before the Medical Society of that city, reported as follows:—

“When I began my experiments with black small-pox, I should, perhaps, have chosen animals for the purpose; but the most fit subjects, calves, were obtainable only at considerable cost. There was, besides, the cost of their keep; so I concluded to make my experiments upon the children of the Foundlings’ Home, and obtained kind permission to do so from the head physician, Professor Medin.

“I selected fourteen children, who were inoculated day after day. Afterward I discontinued them and used calves. I did not continue my experiments on calves long; once because I despaired of gaining my ends within a limited period, and again because the calves were so expensive. I intend, however, to go back to my experiments in the Foundling Asylum at some future time.”

A physician now resident in San Francisco, Cal., writing to the New York Medical Journal, reports as follows concerning work carried on by him in Honolulu:—

I inoculated with the virus of syphilis the arms of six leper girls under twelve years of age. December 14, I repeated the experiment. This last time I inoculated fourteen lepers. . . . Since coming to San Francisco, I have tried on several occasions to get the opportunity (to inoculate a leper with syphilitic virus), but so far without success. While the twenty cases in which I inoculated syphilis on lepers are not absolutely conclusive, still it is a point worth consideration. It is to be hoped that this experiment should be tried by competent observers under more favorable circumstances.

Surely the miseries of the leper are sufficiently terrible without being compelled to carry the virus of that disease in his system. In another case the experimenter tells plainly of his success in securing a healthy boy whom he inoculated with germ consumption. The patient, he said, was very susceptible to the poison, was seized with the most intense fever which lasted for four days, and certain glands of his body swelled up to many times their natural size. The vivisector says: “I can not yet say whether the boy will be consumptive in consequence of my treatment.” The treatment was given to see whether the boy would take consumption by inoculation. It was of no concern to the vivisector whether the boy died of that terrible disease or not, whether he made of himself a murderer or not, just so that he found an answer to his heartless inquisitiveness.

Another report tells of the torturing of insane patients in a public insane asylum in Voralberg, Austria. These patients were inoculated with various poisons simply to see what effect the inoculation would have. The irresponsible patients did not object materially to any of this work, except the inoculation with hyoscamine sulphate. The result of the inoculation with this poison was so terrible, the report states, that when the physicians attempted to repeat the experiment, the insane victims fought like wild men. Many also asked the doctors on their knees, to let them die rather than inoculate them with this terrible medicine. These pitiable subjects endured the results of the injection for weeks, breathing with great difficulty, barely able to swallow; mouth and throat so dry as to be a veritable torture, thirst unquenchable, sleep reduced to one or one and a half hours per day, loss of appetite, loss of flesh, and terrible pains during the night. Such torture seems more the work of demons than of men, especially when practised upon such victims as these.

Dr. K. Menge, of the University Hospital for Women, in Leipzig, Germany, tells in the German Medical Weekly of experiments performed upon thirty-five pauper women. These poor women were inoculated with germs from the most repulsive matter imaginable. The vivisector says, “All the bacteria planted were capable of taking root and flourishing.” Of course they were. That is the business of disease, to propagate itself. But it is the business of physicians to prevent it.

Another physician tells of his experiments in inoculating three new-born babes with “very considerable quantities of staphylococci.” Another tells of inoculating with purulent bacteria eighty-two pauper women who were awaiting confinement at a university clinic. Eighty cases are cited where children between the ages of eight and fifteen were inoculated with various contagious diseases for experimental purposes. A similar outrage was performed on a large number of women about to become mothers, whereby their innocent offspring were cursed with a terrible disease from the moment of their birth. Another physician took bacilli from the decomposing corpse of a patient who died from an infectious disease, and injected them into thirty-five women and three new-born babes, who were taken into the experimenting chamber almost immediately after birth.

We have no desire to go further in relating the practise of this terrible business. We have no disposition to pander to morbid curiosity, nor to condemn physicians who are physicians indeed. We know there are such. But the statement of these terrible crimes against humanity, this terrible recklessness with human life, must certainly cause the thoughtful to stop and consider what kind of progress we have made in civilization; what kind of golden age this is upon which we are said to have entered; what the condition of the minds of such men must be; and what society has to expect from the increase of this insidious and frightful business. Does it tell us of the approach of the millennium? Or does it declare to us, in unmistakable language, what the Word of God is also telling us, that this age and this world are drawing near to the end of their history? The race is deteriorating in morals, in physique, in religion, in true culture of soul, in Christian life; and the facts above stated are but a small portion of the evidence that this is so.