On June 10, 1896, Dr. Henry P. Bowditch, then professor of physiology in Harvard Medical School, delivered an address on vivisection before the Massachusetts Medical Society. The character of his audience, and the profession of the speaker, might be presumed to give assurance of absolute accuracy concerning any question of historic fact. A quarter century before, Dr. Bowditch had studied physiology in German laboratories Returning to America in 1871, he had been given the opportunity of reorganizing the teaching of physiology at Harvard Medical School, so as to bring it into conformity with Continental methods. It is quite probable that to him, more than to any other person, is due the introduction of Continental methods of physiological instruction in the medical colleges of the United States. According to Dr. Bowditch, the criticism of vivisection in England began in 1864. To his audience of physicians he made the following statement: "The first serious attack upon biological research in England seems to have been made in an essay entitled `Vivisection: is it Necessary or Justifiable?' published in London in 1864, by George Fleming, a British veterinary surgeon. This essay is an important one, for although characterized at the time by a reviewer in the London Athenaeum as `ignorant, fallacious, and altogether unworthy of acceptance,' its blood-curdling stories, applied to all sorts of institutions, have formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of subsequent vivisection writers."