Which Shall Live—Men or Animals?Baynes, Ernest Harold
Philosophy
Which Shall Live—Men or Animals?
Baynes, Ernest Harold
Vivisection
Recently I attended the clinic of a throat specialist in the east.
I saw child after child wheeled into the amphitheatre and relieved,
usually in a few moments, of foreign bodies that they had sucked into
the windpipe and that a few years ago would in many cases have caused
death, either directly or as the result of a dangerous operation.
So dextrous is this man that his little patients do not need any
anesthetic. After his work was done I had a talk with him, and he told
me that the technic of these operations had been worked out with great
care on dogs that were always under an anesthetic. He also told me that
by the use of two dogs he had trained fifty other men to do similar
work.
[Illustration: _This is Whitey, about eight months after the complete
removal of the parathyroid glands. These glands are quite often partly
and accidentally removed during operations on the thyroid gland in
man, with alarming and sometimes fatal results. Following complete
removal of the parathyroid glands, carnivorous animals, including man,
die within from four to six days. As a result of experimental work on
this dog and other animals, three effective curative measures have
been developed, which indefinitely preserve the life of such animals
in normal health. Two persons are known to have been saved and several
others have been rendered free from symptoms as a result of this
study._]
III
In the Civil War if a man was shot through the bowels, he was doomed
to death; the surgeons hardly dared to open the abdomen and if they
did they didn’t know how to join the ends of the bowel so that it would
not leak. Of course the slightest leak meant infection and death. Then
came along an experimenter who etherized about thirty dogs, shot them
through the bowels, and practiced joining bowel ends until he could
make a perfect joint. It is safe to say that in the World War the
lives of thousands of men were saved as a result of that series of
experiments.
[Illustration: _These children at the Anna Durand Hospital, Chicago,
have been saved from death from diphtheria by the use of antitoxin. The
boy in the center has a squint as the result of his sickness._]
Lockjaw, tetanus, chiefly a disease of war, that threatened to
take frightful toll of soldiers wounded on the tetanus-infected
battlefields of Europe, did little damage during the late war because
of antitetanus serum made from the blood of immunized horses. Every
wounded man received an injection of this serum at the earliest
possible moment, and usually the length of time that had intervened
determined whether the man would live or whether he would die a most
distressing and horrible death.
[Illustration: _The homes of this boy and girl have to thank research
workers and animals for the lives saved by antitoxin for diphtheria.
Without antitoxin, developed by experimental work on animals, such
children would have had slim chances of recovery._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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