I write this not boastfully but truthfully.... Painful experiments have played no indispensible part in the discovery of anaesthesia. --------------------- It is a curious fact that every method of research which is most enduring, most intellectual and most free from moral evil is farthest away from any and every thing that shocks the conscience or raises a doubt as to necessity, in sensitive minds. If mathematics had to be cultivated through experiments on living animals, it would never have succeeded in unfolding the magnificent mysteries of the universe. The same applies to the work of the science of chemistry, of botany, and of physics generally. In my opinion, every man who studies natural things by experiments on living subjects of any species, feels the truth of what I am saying. I know in my own case, that my mind during such experiments has always been in a different state according to the line of experiment. When the experiment has been conducted on dead or inanimate matter, the return obtained from the labour demanded has always been not only satisfacdtory, but pleasant to the mind. On the contrary, when the experiment has been conducted on living or animate matter, the labour, whether affirmative or negative in its results has never, at any point of it been pleasant. The results may, and often have excited curiousity; they may have been important, and they may have opened the way to new inquiry, but they have never been free of anxiety nor of a sense that whatever came from them, THERE WAS SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT RIGHT. I do not believe I am more sentimental than any of my colleagues; yet I never proceeded to any experiment on a living animal, though to the best of my ability doing everything possible to save all pain, without feeling--what I think is the proper expression,--COMPUNCTION. --------------------- In the hands of the teacher, it (vivisection) may be rankly abused; of scientific pursuits, it is the one most liable to error; it suggests no end to itself, but seems to grow by what it feeds on, becoming by repetition and contest more and more extended and multiplied; it is of all pursuits the most disliked by the educated community; it brings its best and most self-sacrificing professors into scorn; and for all such reasons, even if it be occasionally useful, is calculated to lead to what would be esignated intellectual and moral evil. At the same time, let it be understood that I do not include in the criticisms experiments which being devoid of pain, may cause the death even for the service of man. Above all, I could not for a moment object to experiment by a truly competent man for the purpose of inquiry into some great theory that has been leisurely formed, and can be proved or disproved by no other means, as for example, whether an important surgical operation can or cannot be performed for the saving of human suffering or human life.