< Violationism: or, Sorcery in Science (continued from page 12-112) >
their stomachs were opened, while the cats were pinned alive on a table, their livers were pricked with needles, the stomachs were then sewn up, and the cats left in that condition until death ensued from prolapse of the bowels; some of the animals surviving the torture as long as twenty-six days.”—St. Bartholomew Hospital Reports.
“Burns were produced by sponging the chests and bellies of dogs with turpentine five or ten times in quick succession, setting fire to it each time; and scalds, by pouring over the dogs eight ounces of boiling water nine times in quick succession. All the dogs died, either in a few hours, or at the latest, after five days.”—Edinburgh Medical Journal, 186!).
“Delaroche and Berger baked hundreds of animals to death in ovens, the heat being gradually increased until death ensued. Claude Bernard invented a furnace for roasting or baking animals to death, the details and diagram of which apparatus are given in his ‘Lessons on Animal Heat.’ Magendie has also shewn by numerous experiments that dogs perish at the end of about eighteen minutes in a furnace heated to 120° (centigrade), and at the end of twenty-four minutes in one heated to 90°; or in one at 80° at the end of thirty minutes.”—Beclard’s “Treatise on Physiology,” and Gavarret's “Animal Heat.”
“Professor Mantegazza has recently investigated the effects of pain on the respiratory organs. The best methods for the production of pain he finds to consist in planting nails, sharp and numerous, through the feet of an animal in such a manner as to render the creature almost motionless, because in every movement it would feel its torment more acutely. To produce still more intense pain, it was found useful to employ injuries followed by inflammation. An ingenious machine, constructed expressly for the purpose, enabled the professor to grip any part of an animal with pincers with iron teeth, and to crush or tear or lacerate the victim so a3 to produce pain in every possible way. Ono little guinea-pig, far advanced in pregnancy, endured such frightful tortures that it fell into convulsions, and no observations could be made on it. In a second series of experiments, twenty-eight animals wore sacrificed, some of them taken from nursing their young, exposed to torture for an hour or two, then allowed to rest an hour, and then replaced on the machine to be crushed or torn for periods varying from two to six hours. Tallies are appended by the Professor, in which the cases of ‘great pain’ are distinguished from those of ‘excessive pain,’ the victims of the last being ‘larded with nails in every part of the body.’ All these experiments were performed with much patience and delight.”— “Of the Action, of Pain,” dec., by Prof. Mantegazza, of Milan, 1880.
The two following experiments are cited from Baron Ernst de Weber’s “Torture-chamber of Science,” and also from the Courrier de Lyon, June 8th, 1880:—
“Cut open the body of a pregnant bitch at the point of delivery, and observe whether in her dying and mutilated condition one will not attempt to caress and lick her little ones.”
“Pierce the forehead of a dog in two places with a largo gimlet, and introduce through the wounds a red-hot iron. Then throw him into a river, and observe whether in that state ho will be able to swim.”
Professor Goltz, of Strasburg, writes:—
“A very lively young dog which had learnt to shake hands with both fore-paws had the left side of the brain extracted through two holes on the 1st December, 1875. This operation caused lameness in the right paw. On being asked for the left paw the dog immediately laid it in my hand. I now demand the right, but the creature only looks at me sorrowfully, for he cannot move it. On my continuing to press for it, the dog crosses the left paw over, and offers it to me on the right side, as if to make amends for not being able to give the right. On the 13th January, 187G, a second portion of the brain was destroyed; on February 15th, a third; and on March 6th, a fourth, this last operation causing death.”
M. Brachet writes:—
“I inspired a dog with a great aversion for me, by tormenting him and inflicting on him some pain or other as often as I saw him. When this feeling was carried to its height, so that the animal became furious every time he saw and heard me, I put out his eyes. I could then appear before him without his manifesting any aversion; but if I spoke, his barkings and furious movements proved the indignation which animated him. I then destroyed the drums of his ears, and disorganised the internal car as much as I could. When an intense inflammation had rendered him completely deaf, T filled tip his ears with wax. He could now no longer either hear or sec. This series of operations was afterwards performed on another dog.”
The prize for physiology was by the French Institute awarded to the perpetrator of the above “experiments.”
In “Cyon’s Methodik,” a “Handbook for Vivisectors,” we read the following:—
“The true vivisector should approach a difficult experiment with joyous eagerness and delight. He who shrinking from the dissection of a living creature approaches experimentation as a disagreeable necessity may, indeed, repeat various vivisections, but can never become an artist in vivisection. The chief delight of the vivisector is that experienced when from an ugly-looking incision, filled with bloody humours and injured tissures, he draws out the delicate nerve-fibre, and by means of irritants revives its apparently extinct sensation.”
Have we in this nineteenth century indeed expunged from among us the foul and hideous practices of sorcery, or rather, if comparison be fairly made between the witchcraft of the “dark ages” and the “science” of the present, does it not appear that the latter, alike for number of professors, ingenuity of cruelty, effrontery and folly, bears away the palm? No need in this “year of grace” to seek in the depths of remote forests, or in the recesses of mountain caves and ruined castles, the midnight haunts of the sorcerer. All day he and his assistants are at their work unmolested in the underground laboratories of all the medical schools throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Underground, indeed, they needs must work, for the nature of their labour is such that, were they carried on elsewhere, the peace of the surrounding neighbourhood would be endangered. For, when from time to time a door swings open below the gloomy stone staircase leading down into the darkness, there may be heard a burst of shrieks and moans, such as those which arose from the subterranean vaults of the mediaeval sorcerer. There still, as of old, the wizard is at his work, the votary of “Satan” is pursuing his researches at the price of the torture of the innocent, and of the loss of his own humanity.
But between the positions of sorcery in the past and in the present is one notable and all-important difference. In the past it was held a damnable offence to practise the devil’s craft, and, once proved guilty, the sorcerer, no matter what his worldly rank or public services, could not hope to escape from death by fire. But now the professors of the Black Art hold their Sabbat in public, and their enunciations and the recitals of their hideous “experiments” arc reported in the journals of the day. They are decorated by princes, feted by great ladies, and honoured with the special protection of State legislation. It is held superstition to believe that in former ages wizards were enabled by the practice of secret abominations and cruelties to wrest knowledge from nature, but now the self-same crimes are openly and universally perpetrated, and men everywhere trust their efficacy.
And in the last invention of this horrible cultus of Death and Suffering, the modern sorcerer shews us his “devils casting out devils,” and urges us to look to the parasites of contagion— foul germs of disease—as regenerators of the future. Thus, if the sorcerer be permitted to have his way, the malignant spirits of fever, sickness, and corruption will be let loose and multiplied upon earth, and, as in Egypt of old, every living creature, from the cattle in the field to the firstborn son of the king, will be smitten with plague and death. By his evil art he will keep alive from generation to generation the multitudinous brood of foul living, of vice, and uncleanness, none of them being suffered to fail for need of culture, ingrafting them afresh day by day and year by year in the bodies of new victims; paralysing the efforts of the hygienist, and rendering vain the work of the true Magian, the Healer, and the teacher of the pure life.
An interesting discussion followed Dr. Kingsford’s address. Tho question of the suffering in the animal creation, both that inflicted by animals upon each other, apparently in part by way of amusement and torture, and also that caused by the “blind, unreasoning forces of nature,” was referred to by more than one of the speakers, and it was suggested that an argument might be based thereon by vivisectors in partial defence of their position.
In her replies to the various remarks, Dr. Kingsford took the ground that there must be, somewhere or somewhen, compensation or justification for all that we call evil, and for all suffering. In thinking this out, she was brought face to face with a succession of problems which had led her to the belief that evil and suffering are the result of a degradation, of a
departure from the Divine; that; in fact, the ferocity and the cunning of a man-eating tiger, for instance, were the ferocity and cunning of a human spirit, who in a previous incarnation had indulged in those passions. The lecturer also ably and eloquently defended her comparison between the “sorcerer” and the mere scientist,” pointing out that the aim and ambition of both was the acquisition of knowledge for the benefit of the external, the material, the sensuous man only. Whereas the knowledge sought for by the true priest, the Magian, the real healer, is that which is for the good of the inner, the Divine man, and such knowledge need not to be obtained through the infliction of pain and suffering on others.
There was obviously no scope to go into many of these problems within the limits of a discussion, and the lecturer was asked to give another evening to the Association later on in the season.
We shall be glad to receive the thoughts of any of our readers, not on the vivisection controversy, pure and simple, but in reference to any bearing it may have in relation to man as a spiritual being.