8. That vivisection has no demoralising effect on the character of the operator.
“Look at our surgeons !” they may exclaim. “Are they a demoralised or a brutalised class ? Yet you must admit that, in the operations they have to perform, they are perpetually contemplating pain—aye, and pain deliberately inflicted by their own hands.” The analogy is not a fair one ; since the immediate motive—of saving the life, or diminishing the sufferings, of the person operated on—is a counteracting influence in surgery, to which vivisection, with its shadowy hope of some day relieving the sufferings of some human being yet unborn, has nothing parallel to offer. This, however, is a question to be decided by evidence, not by argument. History furnishes us with but too many examples of the degradation of character produced by the deliberate pitiless contemplation of suffering. The effect of the national bull-fights on the Spanish character is a case in point. But we need not go to Spain for evidence : the following extract from the Echo, quoted in the Spectator for March 20, will be enough to enable the reader to judge for himself what sort of effect this practice is likely to have on the minds of students:— “But if yet more be necessary to satisfy the public mind on this latter point” (the effect on the operators),” the testimony of an English physiologist, known to the writer, maybe useful in conclusion. He was, present some time past at a lecture, in the course of which demonstrations were made on living dogs. When the unfortunate creatures cried and moaned under the operations, many of the students actually mimicked their cries in derision ! The gentleman who related this occurrence adds that the spectacle of the writhing animals and the fiendish behaviour of the audience so sickened him, that he could not wait for the conclusion of the lecture, but took his departure in disgust.”
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898), English author, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection” serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library.
