The Vivisectors' Directory: Being a list of the licensed vivisectors in the United Kingdom, together with the leading physiologists in foreign laboratories
Science
The Vivisectors' Directory: Being a list of the licensed vivisectors in the United Kingdom, together with the leading physiologists in foreign laboratories
Vivisection
“I owe the fundamental idea of my method of experimentation to the memory
of my experience as prosector at Königsberg. I have often dissected out
the arteries of the brain filled with torpid matter.… I resolved to try
whether it would be possible to rinse out the living brain and spare the
larger veins. The very first effort was so successful that it encouraged
me to proceed, and that was the origin of this work.… All my experiments
were made on dogs which I chloroformed before the operation. To bare
the skull, I generally made first a cut in the centre and separated the
skin on one side, so that the muscles of the temples were visible. Then
according to the experiment I wished to make, a portion of the muscle was
cut away to expose the place in the bone where the hole was to be bored.
According to the requirements of the case, one, two, or still more holes
were bored, and after making a cut in the head skin, the brain matter
was rinsed out. I generally used spring water, heated to the temperature
of the blood.… At all events till now, as far as my knowledge of the
literature of this subject goes, no one has succeeded in making such
extensive destruction of the brain and still preserving life. I have
succeeded in a series of experiments made at different intervals, in so
seriously injuring one hemisphere, that all the circumvolutions that
touched the skull had disappeared. The animal lived for weeks with its
crippled brain, and served for many observations.”--_Verrichtungen des
Grosshirns_, pp. 3-8. (A work dedicated to his “English Friends.”)
“It is not often that two physiologists agree in matters relating to the
physiology of the brain.”--_Ibid._, p. 9.
“I do not by any means claim that my researches can be of any value in
themselves for the pathology of the human brain. Let the pathologists
continue steadily to collect facts, then the apparent contradictions
between the experiments on animals and the observations at the bedside
will soon be reconciled.”--_Ibid._, p. 176.
“The fact that both in tortoises and in toads, the extirpation of the
cerebellum and the superior two-thirds of the bulbus _does not abolish_
the sense of equilibrium, proves that the too widely generalised theory
of Goltz which localises this sense in the cerebellum, as also that of
Vulpian, who in the inferior vertebrates, places the seat of this sense
in the part corresponding to the annular protuberance of the superior
vertebrates, are both equally inexact.--Florence, June, 1883.”--FANO,
“_Recherches expérimentales sur un nouveau centre automatique dans le
tractus bulbo-spinal._”--_Arch. ital. de Biol._, Vol. III., p. 368.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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