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exhibition, for the first year or two, of decapitated frogs, and then no doubt, by and by, of vivisected rabbits and dogs? Shall our young ladies' boarding schools be entertained (like one now existing near Paris) by the spectacle of dying cats, poisoned to inspire the pupils with a vivid idea of the properties of a drug? Shall we have our hospitals employed (like one in Cincinnati last year) in ingeniously proving Professor Ferrier's cerebral investigations and painful experiments on the brain of a dying patient who sought the shelter of that "Good Samaritan" institution?[1]
It is not to be endured that such a process of moral deprivation should be permitted to go on amongst us un-checked. Something must be done to put a stop to the development of this novel form of cruelty, and to bring within limits of Law, and under the close cognizance of public attention deeds which have been multiplied only because they have been done in the dark.
To restore the true moral perspective of acts of cruelty, it is needful that those who have looked on them so closely and so familiarly as to have become blind to their enormity, should learn how they appear to others whose eyes are yet fresh to the horrid spectacle, and who can take in from their remoter standpoint at once the vaunted bribe of relief to their own maladies, and the price which must be paid for it beforehand, in the pangs of innocent creatures. And as
- ↑ See "British Medical Journal," May 23, 1874, p, 687; also American Journal of the Medical Sciences," April, 1874, p. 308; also "Revuedes Sciences Medicales," Paris, Juillet, 1874. The woman's name was Mary Rafferty. She was admitted into the Good Samaritan Hospital, January 26, 1874, and there treated as described by Dr. Bartholow.
