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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2017
This article examines the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) and its campaign in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to end the practice of live scientific experimentation on animals. In attempting to enact state and federal-level legislative reform, the AAVS ran up against the American Medical Association (AMA), who claimed vivisection was critical to furthering medical advances and who sought to defend their profession's recently won respectability. This article argues that the very public campaign by the AAVS toward political reform pushed the AMA, and medicine more broadly, into the political sphere. The debate over the morality of vivisection at the beginning of the last century was thus critical to creating the politically powerful AMA of the twenty-first century.
1 Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 12, 1885.
2 “An Address by William W. Keen,” Records of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Box 10.2, Folder 247, Temple University Urban Archive, Paley Library, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter referred to as Records of the AAVS).
3 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “vivisection” as “The action of cutting or dissecting some part of a living organism; spec. the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study.” This article uses the terms “vivisection” and “animal experimentation” synonymously. Both are used here to indicate the practice of conducting surgery or other medical practice as a means to determine how living bodies operate. “Antivivisection” is used to denote people and organizations opposed to such practice"; “vivisection, n.,” OED Online.
4 The history of vaccination and opposition to vaccination is a burgeoning field of inquiry. For British vaccination history, see Durbach, Nadja, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Williamson, Stanley, The Vaccination Controversy: The Rise, Reign and Fall of Compulsory Vaccination for Smallpox (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. The recent historiography on the procedure in the American context is particularly robust. See Johnston, Robert D., The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Colgrove, James Keith, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Willrich, Michael, Pox: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2011)Google Scholar; and Walloch, Karen, The Anti-Vaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination in the United States (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
5 Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: BasicBooks, 1982), 13–29 Google Scholar. Social authority, according to Starr, is the means by which doctors are at the top rung of a ladder of practice, with nurses, technicians, and others who act on their behalf based on the doctor's expertise. Cultural authority is, in Starr's words, “the authority to interpret signs and symptoms … [and] shaping the patients’ understanding of their own experience” (Starr, p. 14). Finally, occupational control in the medical context is exercised through the ability of professional organizations like the AMA to police its own ranks through licensure, educational standardization, and institutional practices.
6 Reagan, Leslie J., When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and the Law in the United States, 1867–1973, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
7 Mohr, James C., Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978), 148Google Scholar.
8 Mohr, Abortion in America, 220.
9 Both pro-vivisection and antivivisection movements referred to this legislation as “Senate Bill 34.”
10 This historiography includes Turner, James, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Beers, Diane L., For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, to a lesser extent, Pearson, Susan J., The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Children and Animals in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar though Pearson barely mentions antivivisection at all.
11 Historian Kathleen Kete summarized this school of thinking and the problems it poses in “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection” in Rothfels, Nigel, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 21Google Scholar.
12 Lawrence, and Finsen, Susan, The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect (New York, Twane Publishers, 1994), 50Google Scholar.
13 Buettinger, Craig, “Women and Antivivisection in Late Nineteenth Century America” in Journal of Social History 30:4 (1997): 857–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Elston, Mary Anne, “Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorian England, 1870–1900” in Rupke, Nicolaas A., ed., Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 259–94Google Scholar; and Lansbury, Coral, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
14 Some historians of Progressive Era movements highlight the degree to which reformers aimed to reshape society to fit their morality. See McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: The Free Press, 2003)Google Scholar. However, progressivism also contained strains of intense pragmatism, rationality, and secularism, none of which particularly fit the Christian overtones and moralism of antivivisection activists. The movement to end animal experimentation thus sits uncomfortably in the pantheon of Progressive Era reforms. For studies of pragmatic progressivism, see Kloppenberg, James, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Westbrook, Robert B., John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
15 For professionalization during the Progressive Era, see Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1972)Google Scholar; and Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar. Hofstadter and Wiebe emphasize status uncertainty among professional classes such as lawyers and doctors as helping introduce them to the progressive movement. These older works take progressivism as a conceptual given, a notion which later received some pushback. Daniel T. Rodgers in 1982 made a convincing case that “Progressivism” as a movement is a fiction itself ( Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism” in Reviews in American History 10:4 (1982): 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) Wiebe and Hofstadter are far better tools for engaging with the effects of progressive reforms than their causes.
16 For the deep roots of antivivisection, see Andreas-Holger Maehle and Ulrich Trohler, “Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments” in Rupke, Vivisection in Historical Context. Contention over vivisection as a scientific practice has a long history. The arguments both in favor of and opposed to the practice date back to antiquity and gained a moment of particular salience in Enlightenment Europe. William Hogarth's 1751 engraving, The Four Stages of Cruelty depicted animal cruelty as a moral outrage while University of Leipzig professor Christlob Mylius (1722–1754) argued vociferously for the practice's scientific benefits. These debates, however, were largely contained to elite circles and all occurred before the medical profession gained cultural authority in Starr's sense of the term.
17 Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 8, 1916. A thorough biography of White remains to be written, but her activism in the AAVS, Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PSCPA) as well as the child protection movement warrants further insight as to her role as a hub of progressivism in Philadelphia.
18 Susan E. Lederer, “The Controversy Over Animal Experimentation in America, 1880–1914” in Rupke, Vivisection in Historical Context, 236–58. Lederer provides an excellent narrative of the American antivivisection movement, which I have summarized here.
19 “Proceedings of the National Medical Conventions Held in New York, May, 1846 and Philadelphia, May, 1847,” 17, in the Archive of the American Medical Association Online Collection, http://ama.nmtvault.com/jsp/browse.jsp (hereafter referred to as AMA Online Collection).
20 “Proceedings of the National Medical Conventions Held in New York, May, 1846 and Philadelphia, May, 1847,” AMA Online Collection,” 17.
21 Duffy, John, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 81–83 Google Scholar. Duffy offers a concise, thoughtful, account of the development of nineteenth-century American medicine and I have drawn from it considerably here. See also Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine. For an older in-depth study, see Packard, Francis R., History of Medicine in the United States, Vol. II (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1931)Google Scholar.
22 Wiebe, The Search for Order, 114.
23 Jamestown (NY) Journal, Oct. 28, 1870.
24 “Proceedings of the National Medical Conventions Held in New York, May, 1846 and Philadelphia, May, 1847,” AMA Online Collection, 38–39.
25 “The Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1848,” AMA Online Collection, 7–8.
26 “The Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1860,” AMA Online Collection, 53.
27 “The Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1870,” AMA Online Collection, 10.
28 Boston Evening Journal, May 24, 1873.
29 Jamestown (NY) Journal, Oct. 28, 1870.
30 “The Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1876,” AMA Online Collection, 95.
31 Mohr, James C., Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, especially 225–36.
32 “The Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1880,” AMA Online Collection, 1070.
33 Mohr, Abortion in America, especially 170–79.
34 “Facts in Regard to the Failure of the Bills Presented to the Legislature for the Restriction of Vivisection” in the Records of the AAVS Box 3b, Folder 12. After this failure, the AAVS changed its mission from restriction of vivisection to outright abolition. See “Annual Report of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1908” in Records of the AAVS, Box 2A, Folder 5, p. 6.
35 Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 30, 1884, Feb. 12, 1885.
36 Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 28, 1887.
37 White, Caroline Earle, “An Answer to Dr. Keen's Address Entitled Our Recent Debts to Vivisection” (Philadelphia: American Society for the Restriction of Vivisection, 1886), 6Google Scholar.
38 “Latest Fad of Vivisectors” in Records of the AAVS, Box 10.2, Folder 173.
39 The Animal's Defender and Zoophilist, vols. 24–25 (London: National Anti-Vivisection Society, 1905, digitized 12/2/2008), 200Google Scholar.
40 New York Independent, Dec. 12, 1895.
41 Untitled flyer in Records of the AAVS, Box 3b, Folder 4.
42 The Journal of Zoophily, May, 1913, 8–9.
43 The Journal of Zoophily, Dec. 1914, 5.
44 The Journal of Zoophily, June 1915, 1.
45 This line of reasoning was common in reform movements during the Progressive Era, including those against child labor and temperance. See, in particular, Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless.
46 Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 3, 1886.
47 New Orleans Daily Picayune, Apr. 23, 1885.
48 “Hon. Jacob H. Gallinger, M.D.,” Granite Monthly: A New Hampshire Magazine 9:9 (Sept. 1886): 247Google Scholar.
49 New Hampshire Patriot, June 26, 1879.
50 “Testimony of William W. Keen, M.D.” in Vivisection: Hearing Before the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 24–25 Google Scholar.
51 “Testimony of William W. Keen, M.D.,” 24–25.
52 “Value of Vivisection to Brain Surgery” in Journal of the American Medical Association 24 (Dec. 1902): 1530.
53 “Dr. Quine on Homeopathy” in Journal of the American Medical Association 23 (June 1899): 1312; and “Attitude of Physicians Toward Homeopathy” in Journal of American Medical Association 7 (Feb. 1896): 300.
54 “Letter from P.O. Hooper,” Papers of William W. Keen, Box 4-2, Folder “H,” College of Physicians Library, Philadelphia, PA.
55 These dozens letters can be found in the Papers of William W. Keen, Box 4-2, Folders A-Z, College of Physicians Library, Philadelphia, PA.
56 “Annual Report of the American Anti-Vivisection Society,” 1909, p. 6, in Records of the AAVS, Box 2a.
57 Untitled leaflet in Records of the AAVS, Box 3b, Folder 4.
58 See, for example, “To All Lovers of Dogs” and “Vivisection—Why it Should be Prohibited” in Records of the AAVS, Box 3a, Folder 1.
59 “Address by W. R. D. Blackwood” in Records of the AAVS, Box 3a, Folder 1.
60 “Walter B. Cannon to William W. Keen, Dec. 13, 1909” in Papers of Walter B. Cannon, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.
61 Veranus Moore, Animal Experimentation: The Protection it Affords to Animals Themselves and its Value to the Live-Stock Industry of the Country (Chicago: Council on Defense of Medical Research of the American Medical Association, 1909), 4.
62 Cannon, Walter B., Medical Control of Vivisection (Chicago: Council on Defense of Medical Research of the American Medical Association, 1910), 3–4 Google Scholar.
63 “House of Delegates Proceedings, Annual Session, 1901,” AMA Online Collection, 1639.
64 “House of Delegates Proceedings, Annual Session, 1901,” AMA Online Collection, 1639.
65 “House of Delegates Proceedings, Annual Session, 1907,” AMA Online Collection, 16–19.
66 “House of Delegates Proceedings, Annual Session, 1896,” AMA Online Collection, 986; and “House of Delegates Proceedings, Annual Session, 1905,” AMA Online Collection, 264.
67 Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 470–79Google Scholar.
68 Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 20, 1907. The antivivisection leaning Philadelphia Inquirer repeatedly used the moniker “vivisection farm” to describe the Rockefeller Institute farm. See Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 9, 1908; and Jan. 15, 1908, for two examples.
69 Corner, George W., A History of the Rockefeller Institute: 1901–1953, Origins and Growth (New York: The Rockefeller Institute Press, 1964), 87Google Scholar. Corner's history of the RIMR is heavily slanted against the antivivisection campaign but provides a useful overall history of the Institute's research and political operations.