Abstract
DR. ALBERT LEFFINGWELL is an American doctor who, as we gather from his title-page, has written on the “Morality of London” and on “Rambles in Japan without a Guide” and who, “having witnessed experiments on animals by some of the most distinguished European physiologists, such as Claude Bernard, Milne Edwards and Brown Sequard, began to contribute to the vivisection controversy twenty-eight years ago.” He is contributing still, and he is no exception to the rule that when an anti-vivisectionist arrives at the controversial stage the impression he makes on a logical mind is not a favourable one. That is because anti-vivisectionists, by addressing themselves continually and solely to audiences of convinced sentimentalists, acquire the habits of rhetoric and over-statement, and become incapable of stating any fact regarding the use of animals in experiment except in a controversial relation. Thus Dr. Leffingwell will not allow to experiments on animals any of the credit for antiseptic or aseptic methods in surgery; he denies, as most anti-vivisectionists do, any reduction in diphtheria mortality, or virulence, by the use of antitoxin; he minimises, so far as he can, the use of antitetanus and antivenous serums. He says nothing about bacteriological research in plague, typhoid, Malta-fever, or malaria; but that is partly because the bulk of his essays were published before those researches were undertaken. It is also because the essays are filled so largely with appeals to the emotions, with quotations from Mrs. Barrett Browning's “Cry of the Children,” and with long references to the iniquities of the slave trade, that there is very little room even for a controversial consideration of the questions at issue.
The Vivisection Controversy. Essays and Criticisms.
By Dr. Albert Leffingwell. Pp. vi + 251. (London: The London and Provincial Anti-vivisection Society, 1908.) Price 6s.
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G., E. The Vivisection Controversy Essays and Criticisms . Nature 80, 63–64 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/080063a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/080063a0
