Anti-Vivisectionists and Protective Medicine in the Army

Abstract

It is wonderful to what follies anti-vivisection will betray those who believe in it. The American Red Cross. has been involved in a lawsuit by some of the American anti-vivisectionists, who are endeavouring to prevent it from doing, medical research on active service. This research would be, almost all of it, bacteriological; it would be inoculations of small rodents in the direct course of the work of the Red Cross for the Army; but the anti-vivisectionists seem to care more for the rodents than for the Army. Dr. W. W. Keen, of Philadelphia, one of the very foremost of American surgeons, whose name is well known, among our own physicians and surgeons, has written an admirable, article in Science of February 22 last on this attempt to interfere with the work of the Red Cross. He tells again some of the oft-told truths the facts of the protective treatment against typhoid, of the protective treatment against tetanus, of the results-of Lister's work, and so forth. He points put that the anti-vivisectionists in his country all these many years have done nothing, absolutely nothing;, to lessen disease or to save life either in animals or in man; and he quotes the statement made by forty-one American medical officers on active service in France: “We feel that anyone endeavouring to stop the Red Cross from assisting in its humanitarian and humane desire to prevent, American soldiers from being diseased, and protecting them by solving the peculiar new problems of disease with which the Army is confronted, is in reality giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”