ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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In the 1940s Dr Helen B. Taussig, Head of the Pediatric Cardiac Clinic of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in U.S.A. allowed surgeon Alfred Blalock to commission his assistant Vivian Thomas to attempt to create an animal model of the blue baby syndrome. After two hundred drastic experiments on dogs Blalock announced that it was obvious to everyone concerned that it was impossible to accurately mimic all four human congenital heart defects in a dog heart, that they could not create anything even vaguely resembling an animal model of a blue baby. Doctors Taussig and Blalock then set about devising an operation without the use of animals and totally different to that performed on dogs.
Four years later, in Great Britain a "blue baby" operation was devised by R.C. Brock, M.S., F.R.C.S., surgeon to Guy's Hospital, London; who wrote an account of its technique in the British Medical Journal, June 12 1948. Brock made it quite clear in his report that the whole procedure was evolved without recourse to animal experiments, and, as stated in Chapter 18 Surgical Techniques, the use of animals for practice operations for the gaining of surgical skills were prohibited in Great Britain under the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876. A comprehensive report of Brock's technique, which was hailed as a success, is found in Annals of Surgery, Vol. 132, No. 3, September 1950, page 498. Yet another successful "blue baby" operation was devised by Doctors N. R. Barrett and Raymond Daley at St Thomas's Hospital, London (again without the use of animals). This is found in the British Medical Journal, April 23 1949, page 699 and this apparently is an improvement on all other techniques.
Though history reveals that the use of dogs in Blalock's initial "blue baby" experiments were erroneous and considerably set back progress, the public was told by the media and the medical community that the blue baby operation was a triumph of animal research. In Heart Research on Animals (A Critique of Animal Models of Cardiovascular Disease), Brandon Reines writes:
"It is a matter of fact that the entire scientific evolution of the blue babies operation was based on observations on patients and not laboratory animals. While it is now possible to correct the four defects in blue babies' hearts with open heart surgery, [also without recourse to vivisection, see elsewhere in this work, - author] obviating the need for the blue baby operation, the development of the blue baby operation is still of critical historical interest. The reason being that the blue baby operation was used by numerous medical authorities and animal researchers in the 1940s to convince legislators to maintain maximum funding for animal research - under the guise that animal research in the development of surgical operations is scientific."
"Virtually every advance in the treatment and prevention of cardio-vascular disease was achieved by direct clinical and epidemiological investigations of actual human patients. In the early half of this century, the development of surgical operations capable of curing infants and children suffering from such congenital defects as tetralogy of fallot, coarctation of the aorta, and mitral stenosis was achieved during the course of actual operations on human patients. The thousands of animal experiments conducted to discover a surgical procedure for the congenital heart defect were an utter failure. Such refinements as the use of pacemakers for complete heart block grew out of observations of patients suffering from the congenital heart defect known as ventricular septal defect."
"The development of open heart surgery and heart transplantations is yet another triumph of clinical investigation: The direct study of actual human patients."
(Brandon Reines.)
Also refer to M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., Clinical Medical Discoveries.
| "Orthodox medicine condones ill-conduct and seeks to restore health without rectifying it. True health cannot be attained in this manner. Vivisection has no philosophy, no ethics, and no width of vision. It will, therefore, disappear in the course of time." (Bertrand P. Allinson, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., in Hans Ruesch's One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection.) |