The exercise of our superior cunning in destroying an animal’s natural means of self-defence, that we may (with convenience to ourselves) watch changes that occur in its organs during the slow process of a lingering death, is an exercise of curiosity which inevitably tends to blunt the moral sense and injure that intelligent sympathy with suffering, which is a fundamental quality in the good physician. The practice of recklessly sacrificing animal life for the gratification, either of curiosity, excitement, or cruelty, tends inevitably to create a habit of mind which affects injuriously all our relations with inferior or helpless classes of creatures. It tends to make us less scrupulous in our treatment of the sick and helpless poor. It increases that disposition to regard the poor as ‘clinical material,’ which has become, alas! not without reason, a widespread reproach to many of the young members of our most honourable and merciful profession. The hardening effect of vivisection is distinctly recognised in the Profession, although often excused under the abused term--‘scientific.’ Dr. Loye, who, with another physician, studied the process of guillotining a malefactor at Troyes, thus writes: ‘Both of us believed that our wide experience of bloody vivisection would have hardened us sufficiently to go through the spectacle without very great emotion.’ It is our duty and privilege, as women entering into the medical profession, to strengthen its humane aspirations--to discourage its dangerous tendencies. We must not be misled by clever or brilliant materialists who take the narrow view that physical life can be profitably studied without reverencing the spiritual force on which it depends. A physiological and pathological laboratory, legitimately conducted for the investigation of healthy and diseased human secretions, in connection with clinical observation, may be made a valuable aid to medical advancement, and I would always encourage the organization of such a laboratory. But to use it for cutting up animals dying under anæsthetics is stupidity, and to convert it into a torture chamber of the lower animals, is an intellectual error and a moral crime.