ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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Appendectomy, together with the Caesarean section operation saves a large number of human lives. The appendectomy was pioneered by the brilliant surgeon Lawson Tait... without animal experimentation.
"Just as the introduction of asepsis, antisepsis, ether, opium, curare, cocaine, morphine, chloroform, and other forms of anaesthesia, all of determinant importance for the rebirth of surgery, owe nothing to vivisection, so the thermometer, microscope, bacteriology, stethoscope, opthalmoscope, X-rays, percussion, auscultation and electronic microscope, all of capital importance for diagnostics, owe nothing to animal experimentation either.
The same applies to the development of vaccination1 and all the fundamental drugs like digitalis, strophantin, atropine, iodine, quinine, nitro-glycerine, radium, penicillin. Not one single important therapeutic discovery is due to vivisection, whereas books can be filled with the cases where animal experimentation has indisputably spelled disaster for humanity, besides misleading or retarding clinical research."
(Hans Ruesch, Slaughter of the Innocent, page 198, also M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., Clinical Medical Discoveries.)
A glimpse at the overwhelming evidence from medical practitioners reveals the falsity of claims made in Animal Research Saves Lives that life-saving surgical techniques were founded on vivisection. As shown in Clinical Medical Discoveries, Dr M. Beddow Bayly documents the many surgical advances which owing nothing to vivisection but were discovered and pioneered through clinical research. These advances being supremely valuable to the benefit of human beings and animals it is the practice of those who set out to support and defend vivisection, and their jobs, to distort historical facts and thereby create the impression in the minds of the public that such advances were the result of vivisection. Dr Beddow Bayly, in dispelling these claims also outlines the inadequacies and grossly misleading results arising from vivisection. His views are openly shared by hundreds of medical doctors whose opinions are concisely documented in Hans Ruesch's One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection.
British surgery was developed as the result of experience in human patients. Under the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 it was illegal for experiments on animals to be carried out for the purposes of attaining manual skills. This law operated until the recent introduction of the Scientific Procedures Act which came into operation on January 1 1987, rescinding and setting back the struggle for abolition. Sir W. Heneage Ogilvie, K.B.E., D.M., M.Ch., F.R.C.S., Consulting Surgeon to Guy's Hospital and Royal Masonic Hospital wrote in the British Medical Journal (December 18 1954, page 1438):
"British surgery has always stood high because it can be claimed, and not without reason, that every surgical advance of major importance has come from this country."
In the discussions during the Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1912 Dr Granville Bantock, well-known pioneer in abdominal surgery made the following statement:
"I think Mr Henry Morris maintained that abdominal surgery was very much indebted to experiments on animals. I entirely deny that; abdominal surgery is the result of ovariotomy and to that alone is due the success of abdominal surgery generally."
In Vivisection: Science or Sham, Dr Roy Kupsinel wrote in 1988 the following about surgical techniques:
"To gain experience, first an aspiring surgeon should practice on human cadavers, then observe experienced surgeons at work on human patients. They can help out with simple operations, then progress to more complex ones as experience permits. Even the vivisection manuals caution medical students about applying surgical techniques from animals to humans."
"Though the research community would like the public to believe that the use of animals is responsible for the breakthroughs in surgical methods, what really happens follows this typical pattern: In the effort to overcome heart disease, the heart of a human heart attack victim is studied during autopsy. An operation is then proposed to overcome the coronary artery blockage. Extensive animal experiments are then conducted in hopes of developing the surgical skill and in determining the feasibility of the operation on human patients. If the animal lives a false sense of optimism develops and human trials are begun. Due to the variation in blood clotting and anatomical differences between animals and humans, the initial surgeries on humans result in a high frequency of deaths from the operation. Over time, as the surgeons perfect the operation on actual patients, mortality rates from the operation decrease. Surgeons initially claim that the operation will prolong life, but as time goes on it becomes clear that the operation still kills many patients, and in fact doesn't improve the ultimate survival of coronary artery disease in patients. The operation passes out of vogue and is replaced by another one which passes through the same stages of evolution."
In Experimental Surgery, Dr J. Markowitz states:
"The operative technique described in these pages is suitable for animals, usually dogs. However, it does not follow that it is equally and always suited for human beings. We refuse to allow the student the pretence that what he is doing is operating on a patient for the cure of an ailment."
Dr Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899) is recognised as the giant of surgical progress. Celebrated as the most successful and innovative surgeon of all time many of present-day surgical techniques originate from him. In his lifetime Lawson Tait received fame and great acclaim for the great benefits brought to practical medicine by surgical means. Lawson Tait says of vivisection:
"Like every member of my profession, I was brought up in the belief that almost every important fact in physiology had been obtained by vivisection and that many of our most valued means of saving life and diminishing suffering had resulted from experiments on animals. I now know that nothing of the sort is true concerning the art of surgery; and not only do I not believe that vivisection has helped the surgeon one bit, but I know that it has often led him astray." "The position of vivisection as a method of scientific research stands alone amongst the infinite variety of roads for the discovery of nature's secrets as being open to strong prima facie objection. No one can urge the slightest ground of objection against the astronomer, the chemist, the electrician or the geologist in their ways of working; and the great commendation of all other workers is the comparative certainty of their results. But, for the physiologist, working upon a living animal, there are two strong objections; that he is violating a strong and wide-spread public sentiment, and that he tabulates results of the most uncertain and often quite contradictory kind." |
Dr Lawson Tait abandoned vivisection after blaming it for forcing him to unlearn everything for application to humans, he then devised the first successful surgeries for ovariotomy, hysterectomy, colecystectomy (gall bladder removal) and appendectomy.
British surgeon R.C. Brock perfected a method without animals to relieve the "blue baby syndrome" (heart valve defect). (See Chapter 10 Blue Babies.)
| "I have never known a single good surgeon who has learned anything from vivisection." (Dr Abel Desjardins, President of the Society of Surgeons of Paris, foremost surgeon of his time in France and Professor of Surgery, from Hans Ruesch's One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection.) |
"In my six years of training, I have never once learned a surgical technique on anything other than a human being... I would have considered it rather bizarre, unhelpful and counterproductive to have tried to learn surgery on another animal species."
(Dr Marjorie Cramer, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a practising plastic surgeon since 1974, Journal No. 55, November 1992, Australian Association for Humane Research Inc.)
Opponents of vivisection have at their fingertips a surfeit of medical evidence revealing that vivisection is nothing more than a fraudulent means of profiteering by a variety of trades, professions and individuals. The authors of ARSL do not substantiate or present evidence supporting any of their many claims and a mere glance at their credentials reveal that without exception they are direct beneficiaries of the vivisection industry. The writer's rebuttal of Animal Research Saves Lives is of necessity restricted within the constraint's of the booklet's claims. However students of the subject who have no such impediments and who have the ability to exercise full rein on a different line of approach have an abundance of material to produce a more comprehensive work on the way medical progress has been hampered and restricted by the vivisection fraud.
| "The history of medicine has shown that, whenever medicine has strayed from clinical observation, the result has been chaos, stagnation and disaster." (British Medical Journal, October 8 1955, page 867.) |
Footnote
1. In 1796 Edward Jenner successfully used smallpox vaccination on a patient after working for 21 years pioneering the vaccine without the use of animals.
GRUESOME PATENT
On 19 May 1987 the United States Patent Office gave a patent to Chet Fleming of St Louis, Missouri, for a "Device for Perfusing an Animal Head". The "device" would allow the severed head of a chimpanzee or a monkey to be kept alive. In addition: "It might be possible to use this invention on terminally ill persons". The "Summary of the Invention" notes that:
This invention relates to a device, referred to herein as a "Cabinet" which will provide physical and biochemical support for an animal's head which has been "discorporated" or "discorped" (ie severed from its body). This device can be used to supply a discorped head with oxygenated blood and nutrients, by means of tubes connected to arteries which pass through the neck if desired, the spine may be left attached to the discorped head... The severed head preferably should retain all the sensory organs, and the vocal cords if desired... the discorped head might experience a period of consciousness after it has been severed from the body.
Woman's death now homicide RIVERSIDE (California). - A coroner has reclassified as homicide the death of an elderly woman whose head was surgically removed and frozen in hopes that she could some day be brought back to life with a new body. |
(Dr Moneim A. Fadali)