ERRONEOUS METHOD IN MEDICAL EDUCATION
Addressed originally[1] to the Alumnæ Association of the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary
ERRONEOUS METHOD IN MEDICAL EDUCATION
Table of Contents Although it is many years since I have been able to assist in the management of the Infirmary and School which I helped to found in 1853, yet I watch its growth with steady sympathy, and rejoice in its success.
The last Report of the School, which has just reached me, contains a very important item-viz., the effort of the Alumnæ Association to 'Equip a Physiological Laboratory and place it under the superintendence of Professor W. Gilman Thompson,' a New York Vivisector. In relation to this effort, I desire to bring before you some grave considerations which are the result of my long experience in Medicine.
These considerations refer, first, to the kind of work that should be carried on in a Physiological Laboratory, and, second, to the special influence which women are called on to exercise in medicine.
A Physiological or Pathological Laboratory arranged for the legitimate investigation of the material composition of the tissues and secretions of the human body, is an interesting and important department of medical study. The laboratory, however, is now commonly used as a place for experimenting upon living animals as if they were dead matter, or simple machines. This method of research is proving in several ways extremely injurious to the progress of the Healing Art.
The practice of Vivisection and unlimited experimentations upon our humbler fellow-creatures must be considered by us both under its intellectual and its moral aspects. From both these points of view very careful observation has led me to the conviction that this method of investigation is a grave error.
Let me here state distinctly that I willingly acknowledge the good intentions of all and the ability of some of the clever physiologists of the present day, although their method of experimentation is erroneous and the effects of that method injurious, being founded on a fallacy. What I now say, however, is directed chiefly to the instruction of medical students and to the practice of our young women doctors.
I ask you to consider, first, the intellectual fallacy which underlies this method of research. It is a twofold fallacy, resulting from the differences of organization in different classes of living creatures, and from the fact that when any organ is injured, it is a process of destruction or death-not life-that is exhibited.
There is an ineradicable difference of physical structure between Man and every species of lower animal. Nowhere is there identity of structure or of function. Resemblance or parallelism often exists, but identity never. Take the dog, for instance, whose attachment to Man furnishes us with the widest opportunities of observation. In no single function of its body is the action of the function the same as in Man. All the processes of digestion, including its large group of connected organs, differ from those of the human being. Observe carefully the processes of healthy living animals. You will find that their senses act in a different way to ours-a way which is often quite unknown to us, we possessing no power even comparable with many of their powers. Their relations to nature differ in many ways from our relations. It is true that they eat and sleep and dream; that they possess intellectual and moral powers, and are susceptible of education. They exhibit a rough rudimentary sketch of our higher spiritual powers, and are related to us in many ways. But the differences are so great, their whole attitude towards external life is so different, that they may be truly said to live in a different world from ours. So that in no possible instance can we draw a positive conclusion respecting the lower animal nature, that can be transferred as reliable information to guide us in relation to the action of the human organs and functions, either in health or disease. This misleading difference is true not only in relation to the spontaneous working of functions, but it is also true in respect to the actions of poisons, of drugs, and the artificial production of diseases. Animals can be rendered scrofulous, diabetic, syphilitic, leprous, by forcing the poison of diseases into their bodies. Morbid action, atrophy, slow death, can be produced by removing portions of their organs; but no deductions drawn from these artificial conditions can be transferred to man in order to cure human disease or restore lost function. The scrofula, diabetes, syphilis, or rabies, takes on a different form when the lower animal has been artificially poisoned by these diseases. In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.
In 1849-50 I was a student in Paris, and, with the narrow range of thought which marks youth, I was extremely interested in the investigations respecting the liver and gall bladder which Claude Bernard (Majendie's successor) was then carrying on and lecturing upon at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. I called upon M. Bernard to ask him where I could find some work on 'Physiologie Appliquée' which would show me how the results of these investigations could be applied to the benefit of man. M. Bernard received me with the utmost courtesy, but told me there was no such book written; the time had not come for the deductions I sought; experimenters were simply accumulating facts. We are still, forty years later, vainly accumulating facts! This present summer Dr. Semmola, 'one of the most brilliant pupils of Claude Bernard,' lectured in Paris on Bright's disease, which he has been studying for forty years with unlimited experimentation on the lower animals, for the purpose of producing in them artificial inflammation and disease of the kidneys. What is the result to the human being of all this prolonged and ingenious suffering inflicted on helpless creatures? 'Dr. Semmola insisted upon temperance in eating as well as drinking, and said that the best way to preserve health was to eat only what was needed for the nourishment of the body.' No cure for the human malady had resulted from this persistent experimentation.
Is it not intellectual imbecility to waste thought and ingenuity in putting animals to lingering and painful deaths in order to reassert the well-proved fact that intemperance in eating and drinking will produce forms of digestive and excretory disease varying with the idiosyncrasy of the individual?
In late discussions in the French Academy of Medicine relative to chloroform, where Laborde and Franck exhibited experiments on animals, Dr. Le Fort (the distinguished surgeon) says: 'None of these experiments give us any instruction whatever which is useful in practical surgery. Whatever their scientific interest may be, their deductions are in no way applicable to man. Experimenters relate causes of death, but nothing of the sort is generally found in the deaths of practical surgery. The man faints when operations are begun too soon, or is frightened by preparations. He dies because, being a man, his nervous system reacts in a different way from that of the dog or the rabbit. Do not count in any way upon the teachings of physiologists in practical matters. Don't let your patient see any preparations, give the chloroform slowly, wait till he is profoundly asleep. That is all you can do.'
Again, at another discussion at the Academy, M. Verneuil says: 'It is incorrect to say that laboratory experiments give certainty to medicine, and make it scientific instead of empirical. The fact is that experimentation has put forth as many errors as truths. There is not sufficient identity, either physiologic or pathologic, between man and the mammifères such as the dog and the rabbit.' The different ways of dying under chloroform have been long ago stated by surgeons. The experiments shown by M. Laborde on the rabbit must be absolutely rejected, as contrary to experience (in man). Maurice Perrin showed to Vulpian in 1882 that the nervous reactions in man differ from those in animals, and the effects produced by chloroformization could not be relied on as being the same as on man. Vulpian entirely accepted this. The experiments of physiologists have taught us absolutely nothing in the way of preventing chloroform accidents; surgeons have been beforehand (as was natural) in practising artificial respiration and every other method of recovery. However interesting these experiments on animals may be considered, they do not explain satisfactorily the cause of chloroform accidents in man, and in no way show the way of avoiding them.
I could multiply these facts by indefinite quotations from experienced physicians, of the intellectual uselessness of a method of research which ignores the spiritual essence of Life and hopes to surprise its secrets by ruthless prying into the physical structure of the lower animals. We are learning that vivisection is examination of the beginning of death, not of life. Loss of blood is a loss of nutriment; the result is muscular debility and enfeeblement of the vital organs, and the introduction of a disturbance in the vital processes which ends in their destruction. This method of research is now being discredited by many of the most enlightened members of our Profession.
But what I wish especially to call your attention to, is the educational uselessness of vivisection in training students, and the moral danger of hardening their nature and injuring their future usefulness as good physicians.
It is not true that vivisection is necessary to the medical student in order that she may attain...
