1000 Doctors (And Many More) Against Vivisection
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1000 DOCTORS (AND MANY MORE) AGAINST VIVISECTION Edited by Hans Ruesch First published 1989, Hans Ruesch Foundation (PART 1 OF 4) Acknowledgements A large number of people helped create this testimonial; first of all, a Swiss dentist, the late Ludwig Fliegel from Zurich, who in the 1930s published in German many of the quotations that appear in this book and that he had gathered to a good extent from the journals of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, a society which has long since abandoned its erstwhile abolitionist stance no less than the prestigious RSCPA. The lists of German, Austrian and Hungarian doctors who signed their opposition to vivisection in the years be- tween 1904 and 1908 are a facsimile reprint from Fliegel's book. It was published in Switzerland, but soon disappeared from view. Fliegel died mysteriously soon afterward, and his book remained unobtainable until our publishing house resurrected it in 1986. Most of its German quotations, which we now publish in the present collection, were translated into English by Dennis Stuart, whom we wish to thank for his excellent and selfless efforts. The fact that not a single British publisher or A V society, many of whom dispose of conspicuous financial assets, ever undertook to publish such a book as this, and steadfastly ignored all the other works that evidence the scientific invalidity of vivisection, at the time when Britain's new Animals Act of 1986 - also known as "The Vivisectors' Charter" - was being pushed through Parliament, is indicative of how thoroughly the British protectionist societies have been taken over by the opposing interests after the death in 1932 of Walter Hadwen, M.D., BUAV’s last eminently competent and anti-vivisectionist President. (See biography.) The word vivisection is being used throughout this work as a synonym of "animal experimentation". Encyclopedia Americana (1974): "Vivisection - the term is now being used to apply to all experiments on living animals, whether or not cutting is done." The large Merriam-Webster (1963): "Vivisection - Broadly, any form of animal experimentation, especially if considered to cause distress to the subject." Contents PREFACE The Historical Aspect The Medical Aspect The Intimidatory Aspect The Sociological Aspect The Religious Aspect The Psychopathic Aspect The Mercenary Aspect A CHRONOLOGY OF PROFESSIONAL VERDICTS RANDOM ADDITIONS CONCLUSION BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ABBREVIATIONS USED IN BRITAIN “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” - HENRY BESTON - The Outermost House It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible. - John Stuart Mill PREFACE By Hans Ruesch About the compulsion of scientists to perpetuate errors. How can one explain that for well over a century and a half a great many respected citizens, including reputable scientists and physicians, physiologists and medical researchers have irrefutably demonstrated the uselessness of animal experimentation as a means of acquiring medical knowledge, and the damage ensuing to human health from this misconception, and yet the majority of "people who count" in politics, public health, education, media, even in animal welfare, and consequently also public opinion, which is influenced by all these institutions, continue to cling to the belief that animal experiments can't be renounced? There is a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, which shall be examined from various viewpoints. The Historical Aspect History knows many cases where there was a difference between veritable or normal science, (systematic knowledge, logically interconnected facts, establishment of verifiable general laws), and spurious science believed to be true simply because it was endorsed by the powers-that-be, including the Church and the scientists of the time, and that we shall define as "official" science. Official science usually precedes normal science, sometimes by centuries. For example: In the Second Century A.D., the Greco-Egyptian astronomer, geographer and mathematician, Claudius Ptolemaeus, had developed a theory about the universe that according to the knowledge of his epoch was considered masterly and irrefutable, conditioning the way of thinking of all mankind up to the Middle Ages, although it was wrong. It was wrong because it was built on Aristotle's misconception that the Earth is immobile, and the center of the universe. Starting out from this false premise, Ptolemaeus had managed to present a brilliant explanation for the astral movements in the sky that even enabled the sailors to navigate. His theory had the blessing of the Church because thanks to it she could present herself as the spiritual head and religious center of the universe, and not just of an infinitesimal fraction of it, such as the Earth; so when in the 16th Century another astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei, came to upset the accepted theory, true science collided with official science in a resounding clash, which Galilei could only lose, at first. He was arrested, his life was threatened, some have it that he was even tortured, at any rate he was forced to recant. People who believe that today such a thing could happen only in Soviet Russia are grievously mistaken; it happens in our so-called free democracies all the time, in various fields, even if the punishment for dissidence is not the death penalty, but economic or other sanctions, which may equally threaten a dissident's existence. Galilei's theory was not only opposed by the Church, but also by his peers, the "natural philosophers", as the scientists were called at the time. Like many of today's scientists, being revered and admired as sort of demigods by the low as well as the mighty, they would rather have died than admit they had been wrong all along and propagated a mistake. Exactly this happens with many of them today in the realm of animal experimentation. Human nature doesn't change. That is why new notions are only accepted with extreme slowness and reluctance, as one must usually wait not only for all the teachers to die, but also for their pupils to die. Another case in point was Andreas Vesalius, a Belgian who taught anatomy in Padua, Italy. It was around the same time as Galilei that Vesalius, by dissecting cadavers of the hanged (a practice that had been strictly forbidden until then, ever since antiquity), revealed that many of Galen's descriptions of the human anatomy were wrong, because Galen had based them on the dissections of animals. Again science clashed with official science when Vesalius re- vealed the truth - he was accused of "heresy and folly," and had to flee, fearing for his life. For example, Galen had described the human hipbone as being flared, like that of the ox, and when Vesalius corrected him, his peers, the university teachers, unwilling to admit that they had perpetuated a millenarian error, explained that since Galen's day the human hipbone must have changed shape because of the habit of wearing pants instead of the toga! Although the truth was evident for all to see, the Galenic errors survived for another 200 years in the seats of learning, proving once more that no ignorance is so stubborn as the ignorance of the learned. This is just one reason why it is so difficult to get the men in charge of education and the health system to admit that using animals as a parameter for learning something about human biology may well be another of the great blunders of official science. (It is in regards to the most intriguing knowledge of all, the origin of life and the universe, that humans are dominated by one or the other of two misconceptions, which dwarf, in size and substance, any Ptolomean error of the past. Both schools of thought rest plainly on fiction, but the adherents of each belief cling with unshakable faith to one or the other as if it were Gospel truth or "solid gold". One is the Big Bang explanation of our planet earth, with its corollary of the theory of evolution. It is the result of a scientistic mentality that in its ignorance and shortsightedness refuses to admit that there are domains far too vast for the human intellect to encompass and comprehend; so in their ar- rogance they invent hair-brained theories that they present as irrefutable facts, although they have been disproven by their own standards. The other explanation for our existence is, of course, the religious one - divine creation. Although just as fictitious as any of the newfangled scientistic theories, it probably comes closer to the truth, reminding us of Joubert saying that the poets, in their search for beauty, have discovered more truths than the scientists in their quest for knowledge.