An analysis of Collins’s ambivalent representation of scientists and doctors. A discussion of his explicitly anti-vivisection novel Heart and Science

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

This is the introduction to the volume as a whole. It opens by considering Apuleius’ claims to dissection as evidence for a widespread interest in anatomy and dissection in the ancient world, particularly in the Roman period. It goes on to define the terms dissection and anatomy as used throughout the book and to lay out the overarching subject and aims of the project, while situating it within existing literature related to the topic. It particularly seeks to highlight the prevalence and importance of animal dissection, as opposed to the much rarer instances of human dissection, and to emphasize the pivotal role of the Roman period, which has often been underplayed in favor of the Hellenistic period. It concludes with an overview of the structure and contents of the book.

This chapter explores the practice of dissection in the first and second centuries AD, based largely on the evidence of Galen but drawing a picture beyond his activities alone. Divided into sections according to the contexts of and motivations for dissection, it begins with private dissections for practice and research. It next turns to performative dissections, beginning with those for public display. These public dissections occurred at different scales, and this section considers their contents, their diverse practitioners, and the size and make-up of their various audiences, including a discussion of venues, such as auditoria, and their capacities. The chapter then turns to examples of dissection specifically for medical advertisement, including evidence for public surgery, and then to two instances of dissection in the context of formal competition, one attested textually, the other epigraphically. Finally, it zeroes in on the competitive motivations of Roman dissection and its use in the adjudication of medical and philosophical debates, as well as in the jockeying between rivals.

This chapter charts the ultimate triumph of the emotional regime of scientific modernity in the form of antisepsis, Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory to surgical practice. It begins by exploring the ways in which antisepsis eliminated the patient as an emotional agent in surgery. The 1860s saw profound concern within surgery about the devastating impact of sepsis on post-operative mortality. Many of the explanations provided for this phenomenon rested on long-standing ideas about the role of the patient’s constitution and emotional state in regulating their post-operative health. However, by focusing purely on the condition of the wound, and the need to keep it free of ‘germs’, Lister’s antisepsis effectively overwrote these explanations, rendering patient subjectivity largely meaningless. At the same time, however, if emotions no longer possessed any ontological significance in surgery, the second part of this chapter demonstrates that they nonetheless played a powerful rhetorical function, as this ‘new world of surgery’ was configured in highly sentimentalised terms. This sentimentality not only served to counter widespread popular anxieties about surgery’s moral character, but also constructed Lister, the ultimate scientific surgeon and the emotional template for surgical modernity, as a quasi-divine saviour.

This chapter interrogates arguments for doing invasive research on animals in laboratories. A non-speciesist utilitarian test for determining when experimentation may be justified is introduced and discussed as is the abolition of animal experimentation.

Late-Victorian novelists responded variously to experimental physiology during a period of disciplinary upheaval in the mental sciences. In the 1860s, leaders in this field included polymathic philosophers such as Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes. By contrast, later researchers tended to be university-trained scientists using specialized techniques. In the 1870s, British neurologist David Ferrier and John Hughlings Jackson used clinical studies and controversial animal experiments to link parts of the brain with specific movements, emotions, and behaviors.

Some novelists reacted positively to these scientific developments. French naturalist Émile Zola embraced both evolutionary theory and experimental physiology, opining that novelists must ‘dissect piece by piece’ their fictional characters. Zola’s British admirers and imitators included George Gissing, George Moore, and Thomas Hardy.

Authors of genre fiction responded more ambivalently. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, and H. G. Wells favored literary forms that mimicked the scientific method. Wells’s scientific romances tested an imaginary hypothesis (say, human invisibility) against a series of controls, while Allen’s and Doyle’s detective fiction borrowed diagnostic techniques from Victorian medicine. Late-Victorian Gothic novels, meanwhile, explored anxieties accompanying scientific ‘progress’. Taken together, these examples suggest how Victorian fictions responded productively, if sometimes critically, to experimental practices.

If antivivisection was alive in America before the mid-1880s, it had very little to aim at. Slowly, that changed, and from the outset, American antivivisectionists targeted both state and federal legislation as the most likely way to generate support and to secure change. Medical scientists, and Henry P. Bowditch chief among them, found themselves having to work beyond the laboratory, making a case for laboratory work in the legislature. This chapter details the early defence of experiment in the United States in Massachusetts, New York and Washington, DC.

The medical-scientific establishment’s approach to the Second Royal Commission on vivisection was brilliantly contrived to ensure success before Parliament. But insofar as they set out to persuade Parliament to let sleeping dogs lie and be cut, a clear need to win over public support to the cause had re-emerged. Even if the medical community could easily sway a public enquiry, it nevertheless took a great deal of energy, time and money. Ernest Starling and his peers across the research community would have much preferred to be left alone to get on with their jobs. Thus, a whole new communication strategy had to be carved out, so that scientists might get their message across to polite society, and from there to the population at large. The coordination of this strategy was also better handled by parties beyond the world of scientific practice, lest this too drain the energy of medical research and divert its attention to the detriment of the pursuit of knowledge. Hence the need for the Research Defence Society, founded in 1908 and led by Stephen Paget.

This chapter details the formation of a formal strategic defence of medical research in the United States, making good on the ad hoc, reactionary work and individualized preparation carried out by men like Bowditch and Ernst. It incorporates the opening of the Rockefeller Institute, the establishment of the Council for the Defense of Medical Research of the American Medical Association and the development of an art – sometimes literally – of public relations by the medical establishment to protect its scientific methods.

German scientists were troubled by the activities of antivivisectionists, with ideas imported from England, and they still struck a defensive attitude. Yet in this period, the German scientific establishment did not immediately feel compelled to organize collectively, at least not to any great extent, to protect themselves. Their defence was as ad hoc as it was incoherent, perhaps reflective of the small extent to which they were troubled. More significantly, German scientists faced accusations outside of Germany of a brutality or callousness that was specific to the German national character. They were raised, by antivivisectionists and scientists alike, as being a dangerous influence on the morals and character of scientists in other countries. If there was callousness in experimental medicine, so one of the arguments went, it was not because the experiments themselves caused it; it was because Germanness was particularly vulnerable to moral numbness. Given that the rest of the civilized world was sending its brightest hopes for the medical future to Germany for training in experimental medicine, particularly to men such as Carl Ludwig and Rudolf Virchow, this perception of personal character flaws was the cause of fear.

This chapter is framed by Charles Darwin's unwavering support for physiologists in their battle against the antivivisectionists, detailing his public writings on the subject, his private sentiments and his funding of the defensive cause. It covers the formation of the Physiological Society, the organization of the first public strategies of defence, the trial of David Ferrier and the formation and acitvities of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research.

The introduction demonstrates that the history of the defence of experimental medicine is a history of humanitarianism and humanitarian practice. It entangles the experience of laboratory practice and of practical teaching in science with the rise in importance of experimentation on animals, and suggests a historical definition of expertise that was derived through this entanglemnt. It situates the story in a context of utilitarianism and Darwinism.

War also shifted the ground of experiment inexorably towards the human itself. The political reality that emerged after it, and the increasing extent to which national governments co-opted scientific research under secretive and ultimately military ends, meant that, all the arguments against it notwithstanding, experimental medicine significantly shifted its gaze from the animal to the human. Not only did this betray two generations of fierce rhetoric from within the medical establishment about the intrinsic humanity of medical research, which lent itself all too readily to the logic of military research into the doing of harm, but it also undermined other key arguments. Medical scientists had claimed time and again that animal experimentation was not a gateway to human experimentation, but there can be no question that two generations’ worth of lessons in physiology, bacteriology, toxicology and so on were directly applied to experiments on humans.

Mark Twain was a lifelong lover of animals, particularly cats and dogs, and he wrote about animals throughout his writing career: his first national success, “The Jumping Frog,” included a variety of animals, and in his last decade, he wrote works on behalf of animal rights, including “A Dog’s Tale” and “A Horse’s Tale.” Late in his life, he was a prominent spokesman for animal rights and anti-vivisection. He called man “the lowest animal,” but his regard for and interest in other animals never wavered.