Preface by Hans Ruesch to 1000 Doctors Against Vivisection
ISBN 3905280067

It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible.
- John Stuart Mill

About the compulsion of scientists to perpetuate errors.
The Historical Aspect
The Medical Aspect
The Intimidatorv Aspect
The Sociological Aspect
The Religious Aspect
The Psychopathic Aspect
The Mercenary Aspect

About the compulsion of scientists to perpetuate errors.
How can one explain that for well over a century and a half a great many respected citizens, including reputable scientists and physicians, physiologists and medical researchers have irrefutably demonstrated the uselessness of animal experimentation as a means of acquiring medical knowledge, and the damage ensuing to human health from this misconception, and yet the majority of "people who count" in politics, public health, education, media, even in animal welfare, and consequently also public opinion, which is influenced by all these institutions, continue to cling to the belief that animal experiments can't be renounced?  There is a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, which shall be examined from various viewpoints.

The Historical Aspect
History knows many cases where there was a difference between veritable or normal science, (systematic knowledge, logically interconnected facts, establishment of verifiable general laws), and spurious science, believed to be true simply because it was endorsed by the powers-that-be, including the Church and the scientists of the time, and that we shall define as "official" science. Of­ficial science usually precedes normal science, sometimes by centuries. For example:

In the Second Century A.D., the Greco-Egyptian astronomer, geographer and mathematician, Claudius Ptolemaeus, had developed a theory about the universe that according to the knowledge of his epoch was considered masterly and irrefutable, conditioning the way of thinking of all mankind up to the Middle Ages, although it was wrong. It was wrong because it was built on Aris­totle's misconception that the Earth is immobile, and the center of the universe. Starting out from this false premise, Ptolemaeus had managed to present a bril­liant explanation for the astral movements in the sky, that even enabled the sai­lors to navigate.

His theory had the blessing of the Church because thanks to it she could present herself as the spiritual head and religious center of the universe, and not just of an infinitesimal fraction of it, such as the Earth; so when in the 16th Century another astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei, came to upset the accepted theory, true science collided with official science in a resounding clash, which Galilei could only lose, at first. He was arrested, his life was threatened, some have it that he was even tortured, at any rate he was forced to recant.

People who believe that today such a thing could happen only in Soviet Russia are grievously mistaken; it happens in our so-called free democracies all the time, in various fields, even if the punishment for dissidence is not the death penalty, but economic or other sanctions, which may equally threaten a dissident's existence.  

Galilei's theory was not only opposed by the Church, but also by his peers, the "natural philosophers", as the scientists were called at the time. Like many of today' s scientists, being revered and admired as sort of demigods by the low as well as the mighty, they would rather have died than admit they had been wrong all along and propagated a mistake. Exactly this happens with many of them today in the realm of animal experimentation. Human nature doesn't change.  That is why new notions are only accepted with extreme slowness and reluctance, as one must usually wait not only for all the teachers to die, but also for their pupils to die.

Another case in point was Andreas Vesalius, a Belgian who taught anatomy in Padua, Italy. It was around the same time as Galilei that Vesalius, by dissecting cadavers of the hanged (a practice that had been strictly forbidden until then, ever since antiquity), revealed that many of Galen's descriptions of the human anatomy were wrong, because Galen had based them on the dissec­tions of animals. Again science clashed with official science when Vesalius re­vealed the truth - he was accused of "heresy and folly," and had to flee, fearing for his life. For example, Galen had described the human hipbone as being flared, like that of the ox, and when Vesalius corrected him, his peers, the univer­sity teachers, unwilling to admit that they had perpetuated a millenarian error, explained that since Galen's day the human hipbone must have changed shape because of the habit of wearing pants instead of the toga! Although the truth was evident for all to see, the Galenic errors survived for another 200 years in the seats of learning, proving once more that no ignorance is so stubborn as the ignorance of the learned.

This is just one reason why it is so difficult to get the men in charge of education and the health system to admit that using animals as a parameter for learning something about human biology may well be another of the great blunders of official science.

(It is in regards to the most intriguing knowledge of all, the origin of life and the universe, that humans are dominated by one or the other of two misconceptions, which dwarf, in size and substance, any Ptolomean error of the past.

Both schools of thought rest plainly on fiction, but the adherents of each belief cling with unshakable faith to one or the other as if it were Gospel truth or "solid gold". One is the Big Bang explanation of our planet earth, with its corollary of the theory of evolution. It is the result of a scientistic mentality that in its ignorance and shortsightedness refuses to admit that there are domains far too vast for the human intellect to encompass and comprehend; so in their ar­rogance they invent hairbrained theories that they present as irrefutable facts, although they have been disproven by their own standards.

The other explanation for our existence is, of course, the religious one - divine creation. Although just as fictitious as any of the newfangled scientistic theories, it probably comes closer to the truth, reminding us of Joubert saying that the poets, in their search for beauty, have discovered more truths than the scientists in their quest for knowledge. The theory of creation is fiction.but high­ly inspired fiction, filled with human and moral values totally lacking in scientistic theories, with the added advantage over its rival theory that it has never been scientifically disproven.)

The Medical Aspect
Few words need be wasted on this. An anthology of names and opinions of physicians and researchers who, explicitly or indirectly, have denied any scientific or medical validity to vivisection make up the largest part of this book; so the question can be defined, at least, controversial. But if one considers that all those who assign validity to the animal model system are people who derive a morbid satisfaction or a monetary gain from it, the question appears no longer controversial but understandable. Just a handful of examples:

Luwson Tait, the giant of modern surgery (see biogr.) said:

"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 primafacie 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 widespread public sentiment, and that he tabulates results of the most uncertain and often quite contradictory kind."

And in 1988, Prof. Robert S. Mendelsohn of Chicago University, in his last, syndicated Medical Newsletter, The People's Doctor, No. 4, Vol. 12:

"Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an 'inexact science', it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short, everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus, medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine."

And the noxious effects of modern medicine, which Prof. Mendelsohn kept denouncing to mass audiences in books, articles, newsletters, conferences and on TV, were mostly attributable to what Prof. Croce defines "the false methodology" of animal research.

The Intimidatorv Aspect
The uninformed critic might well ask how the deception of the usefulness of vivisection could be kept alive within the medical community itself, considering that there has always been a number of prominent dissenters among them.

Walter Hadwen, one of the most eminent British MDs in the first half of the century (see biogr.), explains this phenomenon in the preface of a book he wrote about one of those dissenting MDs, titled "The Difficulties of Dr. Deguerre".

We quote parts of it, pointing out that the conditions Dr Hadwen describes are no less true today.

"No medical man during his student days is taught to think. He is expected to assimilate the thoughts of others and to bow to authority. Throughout the whole of his medical career he must accept the current medical fashions of the day or suffer the loss of prestige and place. No public appointments, no coveted preferments are open to the medical man who declines to parrot the popular shibboleths of his profession. His qualifications may be beyond reproach, he may in himself possess qualities that command respect, but unless prepared to think and act within the narrow circle of accepted dogmas, he must be prepared for a more or less isolated path.

"The public press of today is largely governed by the orthodox rulers in the medical profession. The ubiquitous 'Medical Correspondent', who draws his inspiration from the pages of current fashionable medical literature, is expected to supply only such copy as will gratify the tastes of the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial chair. The views of the unorthodox are with rare exceptions refused. So rigid is the control which medical orthodoxy seeks to exorcise over the public mind, that not a word upon health matters, however important and interesting, is even allowed to be broadcast by wireless unless it is approved and sanctioned by the bureaucrats of the Health Ministry.

"Every now and then some new medical 'discovery' is proclaimed with clamorous voice. The public eye is arrested by commanding headlines in the leading organs of the public press. The simultaneousness of their appearance and the similarity of the announcements leave no doubt as to how the whole scheme has been engineered. It may be a new cancer germ discovery; a new serum, vaccine, or chemical inoculation; a new theory concerning some old-fashioned disease dressed up in a new garb; a new outcry against flies, fleas, lice, cockroaches, dogs, cats, parrots, rats or goats; but, upon reflection, it will always be found that these 'discoveries' are entirely devoid of originality.

"It is safe to say that among all these flaming pronouncements no real discovery has been made, no original medical idea has been promulgated, no permanent contribution to medical science has been furnished, no advancement in medicine achieved. The public press has been utilized for the propagation of little else than medical sensationalism, proved to be such in time, by clinical and statistical experience.

"Practically all the modern claims of medicine are based upon the theories of Jenner and Pasteur, who have been exalted almost to the position of deities, whose dicta it is held to be impious to question. Those theories, in spite of a strenuous and increasing struggle to fix them upon a scientific basis, remain without foundation."

Modern medicine's scientific basis may be missing, but its financial profits are healthy, and anybody who dares jeopardize them is in for trouble, or worse. Who is "the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial desk" which Dr Hadwen hints at? The answers stand recorded in at least two books, Morris Bealle's THE DRUG STORY, first published in the '40s and reprinted thirty-six times and maybe more since then, although no American bookstore ever dared handling it, and the writer's NAKED EMPRESS, published and re-published in the '80s.3

The Sociological Aspect
From the sociological point of view, man is a herd-animal, highly imitative to boot, as his fads and fashions show. His gregarious and conventional nature influences accordingly his psychic attitude or character.

Contrary to their general conviction, human beings, with rare exceptions are not mentally free, they shy away from venturing into independent thought, from treading unexplored territory; most of all, they are afraid of spurning the dogmas that have molded them, and of distancing themselves, also intellectually, from the herd. They feel safer following a leader, some kind of father image, even without knowing his intimate nature, and not seriously worrying about where this leader might lead them. The moment individuals join a marching herd, every thought process ceases. In fact, they feel freer in following some unknown leader than in having no leader to follow and being obliged to do their own thinking.

The written laws that rule our society in a constitutional state are an integral part of the system that the people want. They are quite happy with those laws, and they are right. But not always. As happens in the field of science, also in jurisdiction some laws become obsolete, retrograde, they lag by decades, sometimes centuries, behind reality, behind the wishes of the majority or the so­cial and scientific changes and needs. In fact laws are changed constantly, old ones are superseded by new ones, but this often only happens under great press­ure, which can take on the form of violence and lead even to bloodshed. Think of all the social unrest of our and past times, some leading to revolutions and civil wars.

Obviously, reforms are started by fierce individualists, by heretics, deserters from the herd, by fearless and therefore always small minorities. The advocates of an abolition of vivisection on medical grounds, of which a goodly number are listed in this work, today still represent a minority. But what does it signify? Wisdom is not found by counting noses. Most of what the whole world now admits to be true or takes for granted, and most great social reforms which have proved immensely beneficial were originally advocated by a small, derided minority - sometimes a minority of one.

The laws that exist in most so-called civilized countries still permit, at best by omission, any and every kind of cruelty to animals, if done under the pretext of medical research, or "science". But since medicine is, by its own admission, not an exact science, and a science that is not exact is no science at all, but an oxymoron (a combination of contradictions), the cruelty carried out on animals is not only unscientific but illegal. And yet, in many countries, regulations established by the so-called health authorities actually impose those unscientific, liillegal tests. How is it possible? It is rendered possible by a fact that the public blissfully ignores, namely that the same health authorities who imposes those regulations are in the employ of the drug industry*, which prescribes those notoriously unreliable tests on animals for the very reason that they are unreliable: they provide the necessary alibi every time a new pharmacological disaster occurs.  Very few people are aware of that. They reason: if there are regulations, they must be good, in the public interest, like the laws against theft and armed robbery.

*How Rockfeller's Drug Trust financed the Board of Education in the beginning of this century in order to promote the consumption of products from its huge drug empire, is related in NAKED EMPRESS.

As at this point in our history vivisection is still being regarded as an integral part of the order of things by the great majority of the population, it is once more the dominating herd instinct of the human species that stands in the way, along with many other important obstacles, to any speedy reform.

The Religious Aspect
The conviction that man is a supremely rational being is one more delusion in which the majority please to bask, even though it is a human idiosyncracy to he more susceptible to demagoguery than logic, more fascinated by fiction than I nets, trusting more the occult than the visible.

The soap operas on TV command more devoted mass audiences than the goings-on on the Senate floor, even though the lawmakers' antics will affect the citizens' lives more substantially than the capers of the screen characters ever will. More people carry lifelong memories of the fairytales heard in childhood than of the works of Marx and Einstein, which most of them haven't even read, no matter how deeply they have transformed the world's social and political structure. And in 1988 the press announced, pretending surprise, that the world's most powerful individual had been looking to the stars for guidance, to the point that the intrusions of the astronomer "began to interfere with the normal conduct of the presidency", as one of Ronald Reagan's former aides (Don Regan) revealed. However, there was nothing surprising in this. Rulers and conquerors through the ages have been afflicted by the very same magical dependency, from Adolf Hitler all the way back to the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Some great men have used this human peculiarity for noble purposes, as have the prophets and founders of the great religions - Buddha, Moses, Jesus Mohammed. Many have exploited it to their own personal advantage.

Banking on magic rather than logic, Modern Medicine, organized by industry-beholden health authorities along strictly commercial lines, in collusion with the tax-squeezing governments, has managed to take over the role that for­merly belonged to the Church. The licensed doctors are this new religion's ordained priests, in whose hands the diffident patients are requested to place their full purse and blind trust, asking no questions. This has been obtained by blending facts with fiction so skilfully that not only the lay public but also many of the participants themselves are often unable to discern between the two.

Most people today deliberately ignore, or tolerate with an intimate feeling of reassurance, the incredible tortures to which animals are subjected in the laboratories of official science. But in the past, the great majority also regarded witch burning as a humanitarian activity that only the ignorant would oppose, because it was not only assured to protect mankind from the devil, but also to benefit the victim, whose soul was purged and thus saved by the fire.

In the same vein, the most cruel experiments on animals are foisted today on the credulous public as a blessing not only for humanity but for the animals themselves. And this because the belief in the benefit of vivisection as a corollary to the excellence of modern medicine has been inculcated into the dense population like a religious dogma, and with the same methods religions use to proselytize: continuous, systematic repetition of dogmatic claims unburdened by proofs, beginning in infancy, to the accompaniment of dark threats to any unbeliever, until the belief becomes a deeply radicated conviction - a blind faith, unfettered by thought. Freedom from thought is indeed the inderogable requisite of any faith. Once a faith has been implanted without the aid of reason, it is very difficult to eradicate it by reasoning: it has become a superstition.

The Britannica gives the following definition of Superstition:- "A belief founded on irrational feelings, especially of fear, and marked by credulity; also, any rite or practice inspired by that belief. Specifically, a belief in a religious system regarded (by others than the believer) as without reasonable support. Credulity regarding, or reverence for, the occult or supernatural."

It will be noted that this definition of Superstition applies equally to Religion, as well as to the belief in the excellence of Modern Medicine.

Thus, when we speak of the religion of Modern Medicine, we also mean to say the superstition of Modern Medicine, and the various rites this medicine performs are closely connected to the financial gain - and power - of its white robed priests and more so of the heads of the syndicates, who make up the real power and take the lion's share of the gains.*

*See Naked Empress, p. 35/36.

The vaccination myth is the most widespread superstition modern medicine has managed to impose, but, being by the same token the most profitable, it will prove to be also one of the most enduring, though there was never the slightest  of scientific evidence upholding it.

Suffice it to say now that the various epidemics have experienced in all countries the same natural evolution of growth, decline, and eventual disappearance, whether vaccination or other therapies had been introduced or not. The only demonstrable effects were the widespread damages caused by the various vaccinations, none excluded.

Most pediatricians we know in Italy and France do not vaccinate their own children, although they cannot refuse to vaccinate their clients' children, if they want to retain their union licence to practice. In West Germany, Medizinaldi-recktor Dr. med. Gerhard Buchwald had first to be shocked into awareness by seeing his own son turn into a vegetable as a consequence of smallpox vaccination, before embarking into a worldwide study that eventually led to the abolition of compulsory vaccination in his country, after he had demonstrated that there hadn't been a death from smallpox for years, but hundreds of people had died from the inoculation.

In the USA, several lawyers have published guidelines for parents on "How To Legally Avoid Vaccination", and several others have been seeking out vaccination-damaged patients, and suing the manufacturers of the killer medicament, with such success that many manufacturers nowadays refuse to produce vaccines unless the government who imposes them, also insures them against any damage suits; which many governments refuse to do.

These examples, added to many similar experiences by other doctors in other lands, are rational arguments, but they only very slowly succeed in changing minds that have blindly adopted irrational dogmas, unburdened by scientific proofs, as is the case with all religious dogmas.

So it can safely be predicted that the advertised belief in the alleged blessings of vaccination will be among the last deadly rites of Modern Medicine to go, because it is far too profitable to the medical combine to be allowed to go without a bitter struggle, of which the beginnings can increasingly be seen today, but which will certainly drag on into the coming century. It is indeed so profitable - to Industry and State - that it is incentivated by being offered, or imposed, in many cases free of charge.

But in truth, who gets the bill? The taxpayer, of course.

That Modern Medicine can more rightly be defined as a religion than a science is demonstrated by the following:

An enlightened young patient at Zurich Cantonal Hospital had his torn Achilles tendon sewn together again and was then ordered to take some pills for several days. "Why take pills for a sewn- up tendon? Won't they affect my whole body?" - " Oh, no!" was the white-coated priest's cheerful reply. "Those pills have a selective effect - only on your tendon!"

That a doctor in a leading Swiss hospital can make such a statement without fearing to be laughed at demonstrates to what extent Modern Medicine has succeeded in passing itself off as a religion, in which the faithful are expected to have blind faith, rather than a science, which solicits discussions, debates, and evidence.

The Psychopathic Aspect
Sadism is a very ugly word, which serves to define a very ugly psychopathy - a mental disease. Vivisectors have been known to accept with equanimity the allegation of being money grubbers - of doing cruel experiments only to gain money or a professorship*. But we have never known a vivisector who bore with equanimity the allegation of being a sadist. They always reacted to all such allegations with frothing, like other psychopaths when they are confronted with the nature of their disorder.

*Prof.Julius Hackethal, for example, West Germany's most celebrated surgeon, confessed in one of his books: "Today I abhor animal experiments. But there was a time when I performed them, simply because I wanted to become a professor."

If it is a mistake to believe that all vivisectors are sadists, it would be another mistake to believe that sadism is not rampant in the animal laboratories. It is. In fact, for men and women (more men, as a rule) who are affected by this grave psychopathy (mental malady), and on top of it are animal haters, what kind of remunerated occupation could be more gratifying than a job in a viviection laboratory?

Prof. Ferdinando de Leo, who has been teaching surgery at the University of Naples, Italy, for more than half a century, told us that often, at the end of the first lesson, some student will tug at his sleeve, asking eagerly: "When do we start working on animals?" However, most of the young students nowadays don't like, or refuse outright, to work on animals.

The psychological problem of sadism has been examined in Slaughter of The Innocent, and here we want to give some examples of experiments that were done at the beginning of the century and are still being repeated today, with a persistence unburdened by reason, which can only be explained as a serious menial defect. Today, the experiments mentioned by Dr. Hadwen more than half a century ago are still being performed, again and again, in greatly increased number and with ever new "refinements" added, like the previous removal of particular portions of the brain, or the severing of the spine or extirpation of various organs; only their senselessness has remained unchanged. In the 1920's Dr. Hadwen estimated their number at 100,000 - 180,000 per year. But sixty years later, while a supposedly very restrictive Act was in force, they had soared to some 5.5 million in Great Britain alone, according to Home Office figures. To this, all the unauthorized experiments should be added which physiologists conduct privately, and the experiments at the physiology teaching institutes for which no licence is required and therefore go unreported, and then the mass of military experiments (in Britain at Porton Down, in the USA in many locations from coast to coast), for which no licence is required either, of which no figures are given, and whose necessity politicians like Margaret Thatcher passionately invoke.

Below, two brief reports picked at random from the millions of published yearly experiments, the majority never even getting published:

"In the University of Colorado primate laboratory, baby monkeys are stimulated with grief by removing them from mothers, familiar surroundings, etc., and their subsequent poor health is monitored by brain implants, etc. This brutality is funded by $100,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

" F.L.Eldridge, D.E. Millhorn and T.G. Waldrop of the Departments of Medicine and Physiology, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC 27514) subjected an unspecified number of cats to surgery, removing part of their brains, then fastening them in treadmills forcing them to walk with electrodes implanted in what remained of their brains. The animals received no anaesthesia, but some were dosed with a paralyzing agent like curare. Result: intact animals respond differently to treadmills."

One of the propaganda lines of the vivisection community is that experiments on animals obviate the necessity of experimenting on people. Just the opposite is true, and that was predicted as far back as 1912, when the German physician Dr. Wolfgang Bonn wrote in the medical journal, Aerztliche Mitteilungen, (Nr. 7/8): "The constant spread of the vivisectionist method has achieved but one thing: to increase the scientific torture and murder of human beings. We can expect this increase to continue, for it would just be the logical consequence of animal vivisection."

Those prophetic words were called back to many minds when in 1984 an unqualified surgeon, Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, with a record in animal experimentation of more than 300 transplant failures and not a single survival, substituted in the Loma Linda Medical Center (California) a newborn baby's allegedly defective heart with the heart of a baboon, excised without a shade of anesthetic, as surgeons nowadays increasingly do even with human newborns.

All the leading American press hailed this vivisectionist idiocy as a "historic breakthrough" and "brilliant feat". Details of this incredible, but far from isolated aberration, in which human folly vied with human cruelty, are comprehensively reported in Naked Empress (p. 167-172).       

Raved Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., in the New York Times, November 6,1984: "With every beat the thriving infant makes history...Hers is one of the most exciting and potentially important medical stories in recent times." Another enthusiast of vivisectionist stolidity, and contributor to several important American papers, Charles Krauthammer, hyperbolized in Time magazine: "Baby Fae was a means, a conscripted means, to a noble end."

Folly? Obtuseness? The two are oftentimes hard to keep apart. At any rate, it all goes to show what kind of doctors and newspeople several generations of vivisectionist indulgence have produced. The day-to-day reports from Loma Lynda revealed, to anybody able to "read", that before being released by merciful death, poor little Baby Fae had to endure for three weeks the very same insane tortures to which millions of laboratory animals are being subjected for months and years on end by the laboratory psychopaths. It is understandable that the mother, who had allegedly given her consent to the sadistic operation, didn't want her name to be known.

Not only the intelligence of the experimenters, but also the sensibilities of the public are being blunted in the course of time through the good offices of such press agents as Krauthammer and Altman, who keep commending cruel follies, slated for inevitable failure, as humanitarian achievements and medical "breakthroughs".

So the Lancet, Britain's most authoritative medical journal, could report with its usual professional aloofness in its January 31, 1987 issue that at Oxford's John Radcliffe Teaching Hospital eight premature babies had been subjected to open-heart surgery without any anesthesia. The controversy that flared briefly in a few press organs concerned mainly the question as to whether the babies had or had not received painkillers during the operation. (Painkillers have no anesthetizing effect. Aspirin is a "painkiller").

The press reports also revealed that the controversy about no anesthetics to newborns was old hat - some surgeons denying anesthesia, under the pretext that the shock from anesthetics was worse than the shock from pain, other doctors disagreeing, as usual.

Reported Parade magazine, USA, April 12,1987:

"Doctors have struggled with the problem for years. At a conference of anesthesiologists held in Palm Springs, California, in 1970, a doctor stated that premature infants did not need anesthesia, just some adhesive tape to hold them down." Was that the upshot of 150 years of vivisectionist education and influence?

And now we come to a recent case in which religion, ignorance, sadism, and psychopathy intermingle to produce a script which would discredit any fiction writer as having suddenly turned mad and addle-brained.

On May 9,1988, Turin's Stampa Sera scooped the entire Italian press with a front-page story titled: "They are experimenting on dogs the passion of Christ.  Doctors and experts want to demonstrate that the Holy Shroud was stained during Resurrection."

(The opening sentence on the first page of Slaughter of the Innocent, first published in Italy in January 1976, ran: "A dog is crucified in order to study the duration of the agony of Christ.")

An abstract of the aforementioned Stampa Sera article of 1988 reads: "The President of the National Animal Protection Society (ENPA), Prof. Antonio Iacoe, has requested the District Attorney of Rome, Dr. Rosario Di Mauro, to stop an experiment on five dogs in whom the researchers want to reproduce the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.'  According to Prof. Iacoe, the experiment has already begun, and today it should enter its most significant phase, in a location that is being kept secret, but which should be either in Rome's Gemelli Polyclinic or the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. The scientific aspect of this experiment is in the hands of two clinicians of the Catholic University: Prof. Paolo Pola, titular of the Chair of Angiology [blood vessels], and Dr. Augusto Borzone, of the Institute of Clinical Surgery.

The Mercenary Aspect
Maybe this single aspect is so strong that it might well sweep away the necessity of examining all the previous ones.

Human nature is contradictory, so that we are not only endowed with irrational feelings or instincts that might land us in some metaphysical impasse, as happens to the deeply religious, but we can also be rational to the extreme, especially when it comes to satisfying another characteristic of our nature: the miser's rapacious inclination, a thirst for riches, which can become addictive and, once born, seldom stops growing.

Of this, almost everybody is well aware. But very few realize to what extent their own minds are constantly being manipulated by the gigantic, venal interests that mold public opinion and influence the decisions of science at top levels.

As related in Naked Empress, some 90 percent of commercial advertising, the wherewithal of the mass media, derive from the petrochemical combine and its business partners. And the media manipulate public opinion according to the interests of their main clients. Not so much through the seductive display ads, which only serve to sell products, but much more determinantly through editorials, articles, reports, even letters-to-the-editor, which serve to sell ideas and to justify government policies.

Most of the big petrochemical combines use animals as testing material. Are those animal tests necessary? Indeed they are, but not for the reasons generally stated. They don't serve to reveal the dangerousness of the tested products but, on the contrary, to conceal it.

What if there were no animals? Then the industry would have to test its products in some other way, with some scientific method, using human cell cultures, for example, or any of the other scientific methods available, which would quickly reveal the products' noxiousness. If such methods had been used, all-encroaching world pollution would not be what it is today.

The trend of using animals on a massive scale in medical research was started in America, by John D. Rockefeller, who had learned from his pappy, a travelling salesman of snake oil as a sure-fire cancer remedy, the limitless gullibility of the general public, and how to exploit it.   JDR's genius gave him the idea to involve the government in the profits from the sale of lucrative but dead­y "miracle" drugs, which had constantly to be replaced by new ones, after the advertised "miracles" had not only failed to materialize but had furthermore opened big scars, mental and physical ones, in the nation's health. Exactly how the Rockefeller principle was organised and sold to all other industrialized coun­tries has been exhaustively described by Morris Bealle in his Drug Story (1949) and by the writer in Naked Empress (1982).

To what extent commercial interests determine the consumption of test animals is shown by the following: a small country like Switzerland, with only 6:5 million inhabitants but with a huge pharmaceutical industry, uses more laboratory animals than all of Soviet Russia with its 270 million inhabitants, but where nobody can get rich from the sale of drugs.

As a corollary to this situation, Switzerland has not only the highest consumption of laboratory animals in the world compared to the population, but is also, along with the USA, one of the sickest nations. So it was to nobody's surprise when a 1987 survey showed that Switzerland was world champion also in AIDS cases, proving once more what only the health authorities profess to ignore: that modern medicine, thanks to its therapies and medications, has become the main cause of disease.

Of course, it would be the animal welfare organisations' task to draw the public's attention not only to the cruelty of animal testing, but principally to the damages deriving from a fallacious system of research. But this, most of the organisations fail to do, being no less infiltrated by commercial interests than the media and the governments.

There is indeed nothing easier than to infiltrate an animal protection society. The wolf always arrives in sheep's clothing, the devil always knocks at the door flashing smiles and a golden halo of sainthood: so that the overworked, sometimes underpaid and more often unpaid animal workers in the big societies will sooner or later be glad to relinquish their post to the genial newcomer, who seems to have even more enthusiasm and energy and no pecuniary problems.

This explains such a phenomenon as that of the largest, richest animal welfare society in the world, the RSPCA, whose patron is Her Gracious Majesty the Queen; RSPCA propagandizes the necessity of vivisection, never advertises the damage deriving to the people from this fallacious method of research, and has invested most of its huge assets in bonds and stocks of industries that practice vivisection.

Dr. Irwin D. Bross (see biogr.), with long experience in America's cancer research programs, sheds light on the monetary interests that keep vivisection going, in the foreword to Brandon Reines' Cancer Research On Animals (1986). Dr. Bross' considerations apply primarily to the USA, where most vivisection funding comes from Government sources (taxpayer); in Europe it comes mainly from industry, which also finances the universities, to insure the support and loyalty of the faculties. Writes Dr. Bross:

"It has been historically true in general that 'he who pays the piper calls the nine'. So what is deemed 'officially true' is what is in line with the sponsor's policies, not necessarily what is in line with the facts. Moreover, 'authoritative opinion' nearly always supports the policies of its sponsors. Hence, the decisions in official science are political decisions that only masquerade as scientific ones. Those in official science have the illusion that they are not politically controlled, and at times the public may share this illusion. Whatever may be said, when the time comes to act, the actions are in line with the official policies.

"Consider, for instance, the fact that the National Cancer Institute has spent billions of dollars on animal experimentation. The myth that such research produced the main chemotherapeutic drugs supports continuation of this funding. The medical schools and research facilities of the biomedical establishment that share in this bonanza are certainly not going to let mere facts interfere with this lucrative business. So even though the historical facts here show that animal experiments were worse than useless in selecting clinically effective cancer chemotherapies - they were consistently misleading - the 'consensus of authorities' will continue to say just the opposite. They may claim to love the truth, but when it is a matter of truth versus dollars, they love the dollars more.

"The way to stop useless and unnecessary animal experimentation is simply to make it unprofitable: Eliminate the funding by the government agencies or eliminate the agencies. Reasonable approaches will not work with official science. Guidelines or legal limitations by government agencies are made to be evaded. It is pointless to present factual evidence because it will only be ignored. Protests by animal welfare and other well-meaning groups are easily put off by official evasions. Even for official science, however, there is one persuasive voice: Money talks.

"If the flow of taxpayer dollars that supports the foolish or cruel or dangerous practices of official science is cut off, these practices will stop."

Many of the doctors cited in the following pages have never investigated the subject of vivisection, and not all demand the immediate abolition of all animal experimentation in the realm of medical enquiry; many of them do; but all contribute to the disqualification of the vivisectionist method, nowadays often called "the animal model system," as being cruel, misleading, unscientific, and counterproductive.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Sir Charles Bell (1774-1824)
Scottish physician, surgeon, anatomist, and physiologist, to whom medical science owes "Bell's law" on motor and sensory nerves, which is of fundamen­tal importance to medical science and practice. At the time the aberration of vi­visection began taking root in its modern form, he declared that it could only be practiced and propagated by thoroughly calloused individuals, who couldn't be expected to understand the complexities of biology, because such individuals, he maintained, suffered from a severely limited intelligence - sensibility being a component, and certainly not the least, of human intelligence. "I don't think that men capable of such cruelties have the faculties to penetrate the mysteries of nature," was the way he put it, establishing a new "Bell's law" which has proved as right as his more celebrated one. He was among the many antivivi-sectionists of his time who distinguished themselves for services to humanity, as when he traveled to Europe expressly to tend to the wounded of the battle of Waterloo. His controversy with Frenchman Magendie, who performed a long series of incredibly cruel, sadistic experiments on animals just to "demonstrate" the rightness of the physiological law that Bell had already arrived at by the sheer exercise of intelligent observation and his unadulterated intellect stand described in Slaughter of the Innocent.

Irwin D. J. Bross
Dr. Bross writes as a scientist with more than 30 years experience in public health. In 1954, as head of research design and analysis at Sloan-Kettering, the world's biggest cancer research institute, he initiated and designed the controlled clinical trials that led to what was believed to be the first cures of childhood leukaemia. During the same period, Dr. Bross pioneered the first statistical studies of highway special accidents investigations which led to the use of seat belts and was also a major force behind the reduction in the tar and nicotine levels of cigarettes. In 1959, Dr. Bross was invited by the Director of the Roswell Park Memorial Institute of Cancer research in Buffalo, New York, to head its department of biostatistics. Bross' first project was to set up the first major controlled clinical trial of breast cancer chemotherapy. Using modern sophisticated statistical techniques, Bross has elucidated the actual hazards of such controversial technologies as medical x-rays and toxic waste sites. He is now President of Biomedical Metatechnology Inc. Dr. Bross is author or co-author of over 300 published articles and reports as well as three books, including his Scientific Strategies to Save Your Life, a statistical monograph published by Marcel Dekker, Inc. in 1980.

Vernon Coletnan
A former family doctor and former editor of the British Clinical Journal, he is acknowledged as Britain's leading medical author and journalist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, he has written over 30 books which have sold over 1,000,000 copies and been translated into 11 languages. He has written over 4,000 published articles and regularly contributes to Britain's leading newspapers, magazines, and medical journals. He has also been a broadcaster for nearly 20 years, and his programs have sold in 26 countries. In recent times, he has become known for his antivivisectionist views.

As his immense popularity demonstrates, Dr. Coleman has mastered better than any of his colleagues the fine art of denouncing the unbelievable cruelty inherent in all vivisectionist practice without revealing its negative aspects for human health, which are responsible for turning modern medicine into the main cause of disease today. Had he also conveyed that to his public, all main ve­hicles of information would instantly have been foreclosed to him.

Pietro Croce
Prof. P. Croce, M.D., is a luminary of medical science. Born in Dalmatia in 1920, he graduated at the University of Pisa, Italy. His international curriculum includes: Fulbright Scholarship, Research Department of the National Jewish Hospital of Colorado University in Denver, Research Department of Toledo, Ohio, Scholarship Ciudad Sanatorial of Tarrasa in Barcelona, Spain. Between 1952 and 1982, head of the laboratory of microbiological- pathological anat­omy and chemo-clinical analyses at the Hospital L. Sacco of Milan, Italy. He is a member of the College of American Pathologists and author of many medi­cal books, papers and articles. Currently he is active in a laboratory at Vicenza, Northern Italy, doing medical analyses.

Like so many other physicians and medical researchers before him, Profes­sor Croce one day also came to realize that the much-vaunted animal experimen­tation he had been conducting for years was not only valueless but damaging to medical science and practice. Unlike most of his colleagues - defying pressure from above, the risk of professional retaliation, and the necessity of having to retract publicly everything he had for a long time taught and believed in - he one day abruptly decided to forswear all work on animals and started conduct­ing a courageous, outspoken war against this senseless old practice, by writing articles, publishing books and participating in conferences and debates in Italy and all over Europe on the subject.
 

Bruno Fed),
Professor Fedi qualified as doctor of medicine and surgery at Florence University in 1960. After obtaining the highest marks at the end of a specialist study of urology, he was appointed as Professor at that University in 1968. He went on specialising in the field of anatomical pathology, then in gynecology, then also in oncology (cancer treatment). To expand further his medical knowl­edge, he attended specialization courses in Paris and Barcelona.
Prof. Fedi was awarded a prize by the World Health Organisation for his work. He lectured at the Universities of Florence and Rome from 1961 to 1970. Since 1970 he has been a Senior Consultant for Pathological Anatomy at the City Hospital of Temi, Italy. He has directed medical courses at the Univer­sities of Perugia and Rome, and has published over a hundred scientific papers. He testified on medicine and animal experimentation at the hearings of the European Parliament in Strasbourg in December 1982
Walter R. Hadwen (1854-1932)
Also known as "Dr. Hadwen of Gloucester", is regarded as one of the most remarkable individuals and brilliant physicians of our century. Born in Wool­wich, he showed unusual intelligence already in childhood, being able to read Latin fluently by the age of seven. He was articled to a chemist as a teenager, and achieved his pharmaceutical qualifications when he was 22. In 1878 he and his wife moved to Somerset to run his own pharmacy business, but he soon real­ized that health cannot be bought in pharmacies. Having meantime become a vegetarian, he decided to study medicine. He became First Prizeman in Physi­ology, Operative Surgery, Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and won the Clark Scholarship in 1891, awarded to the most distinguished medical student of the year. Having practiced vivisection in the course of his early studies, he soon rec­ognized that practice as a medical aberration, no less dangerous than the prac­tice of vaccination. He became famous nationwide when he delivered Glouces­ter of an epidemic of smallpox in a shorter time than any other British city, by ruling out all vaccination and introducing strict measures of hygiene and isola­tion of the infected instead; which of course won him the hatred and the abuse of the profit-oriented medical establishment. In 1910 he accepted the Presidency of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), which under his competent and flamboyant leadership quickly grew to be, up to his death in 1932, the largest and most authoritative anti-vivisection society in the world.
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Walter R. Hadwen (1854-1932)

Also known as "Dr. Hadwen of Gloucester", is regarded as one of the most remarkable individuals and brilliant physicians of our century. Born in Woolwich, he showed unusual intelligence already in childhood, being able to read Latin fluently by the age of seven. He was articled to a chemist as a teenager, and achieved his pharmaceutical qualifications when he was 22. In 1878 he and his wife moved to Somerset to run his own pharmacy business, but he soon realized that health cannot be bought in pharmacies. Having meantime become a vegetarian, he decided to study medicine. He became First Prizeman in Physiology, Operative Surgery, Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and won the Clark Scholarship in 1891, awarded to the most distinguished medical student of the year. Having practiced vivisection in the course of his early studies, he soon recognized that practice as a medical aberration, no less dangerous than the practice of vaccination. He became famous nationwide when he delivered Gloucester of an epidemic of smallpox in a shorter time than any other British city, by ruling out all vaccination and introducing strict measures of hygiene and isolation of the infected instead; which of course won him the hatred and the abuse of the profit-oriented medical establishment. In 1910 he accepted the Presidency of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), which under his competent and flamboyant leadership quickly grew to be, up to his death in 1932, the largest and most authoritative anti-vivisection society in the world.

Robert S. Mendelsohn (1927-1988)
Dr. Mendelsohn had practiced and taught medicine for 30 years. As a family physician and pediatrician, he was Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Illinois (Chicago), Chairman of the Medical Licensing Board for the State of Illinois, National Director of Project Head Start's Medical Consult­ation Service, consultant to the Illinois Departments of Public Aid and Mental Health, to the Council of Aging, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Maternal and Child Health Association, and a recipient of numerous awards for excel­lence in medicine and medical instruction. He was also a syndicated medical columnist, author of The People's Doctor Newsletter and author of the bestsell-ing medical books, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women, and How to Bear a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor.
 

Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899)
The gynecologist from Birmingham who performed more than 2,000 laparotomies at a time when this operation was still rare, looms larger than any other in the period that is considered the age of giants in surgical progress. He is celebrated as the most successful and innovative surgeon, and many of surgery's present-day techniques originate from him. He performed his first ovariotomy in 1868, when he was only 21, and by 1872 his name had gone into medical his­tory with what became known in England and America as "Tait's operation" -the removal of the uterine appendages for chronic ovaritis. In 1877 he began to remove diseased Fallopian tubes, and in 1878 he described a new method of treating chronic inversion of the uterus. All this, before he reached the age of 35. He performed the first chole-cystotomy, a gall-bladder operation, in 1879. In 1880 he was the first to successfully remove the vermiform appendix for the relief of appendicitis (in Germany credit for this "first" in surgery is usually given to Swiss surgeon Rudolf Ulrich Kronlein, who first performed it some 5 years later). In 1883, Tait performed the first successful operation in case of ruptured tubal pregnancy. He was also a firm advocate of today's aseptic surgery, challenging Lister's method of damaging antisepsis. In 1887 he was elected President of the newly formed British Gynaecological Society. He won the Cullen Prize "for the great benefits brought to practical medicine by surgical means", and the Lister Prize for the whole 1888-1890 period. So if anyone who ever spoke about surgery knew what he was saying, it was Lawson Tait. And everything he said and wrote about vivisection, which he had practiced in the early years of his medical studies, was a merciless indictment against it, for he considered it deleterious not only for medical practice in general but also for the medical mind. His courage and brilliance caused him to support a number i iiii|H)|)iil;n innovations like the introduction of absolute cleanliness in hospital^ and asepsis rather than antisepsis in surgery, and advocating equal status fo women who wanted to enter the medical profession. (More notes on Lawson Tail in Slaughter of the Innocent.)



ABBREVIATIONS USED IN BRITAIN