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  • Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights
  • Lise Wilkinson
Anita Guerrini . Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights. Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii + 165 pp. Ill. $42.00 (cloth, 0-8018-7196-4), $18.95 (paperbound, 0-8018-7197-2).

This small volume of 165 pages including "suggested further reading" is published in the Johns Hopkins series of Introductory Studies in the History of Science; in her preface Anita Guerrini explains that it was written in reponse to a need felt by her when first teaching a course on the history of animal experimentation at her university. "Introductory" is obviously the key word: this is a volume aimed at first-year students, who should find it very useful, but there is little here that can be new to professional historians of science and medicine with interest in the subject. Indeed, the author states that she is "a historian, not an ethicist" (p. x), and is trying to give a "balanced account" since she believes, with most scientists, that animal and even human experimentation have played a necessary part in the development of knowledge of diseases and their possible prevention and cure in both animals and man. On the whole, not much attention is paid to animal diseases or even epizootics in this short account, except for Jenner's cowpox experiments, although some of the early animal experiments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were performed in (vain) attempts to cure animals of rinderpest and rabies. [End Page 754]

The book's first chapter introduces the reader to the classical texts of Hippocrates and Aristotle, and of the less-well-known Greek dogmatists Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose original documents were destroyed in the great fire of the Library at Alexandria in 49 B.C. Their work is still known to us through the later writings of the Romans: Celsus the historian, whose lifetime of seventy-five years spanned the pre-Christian and Christian eras, and Galen the physician, who wrote during the second century A.D. In chapter 2 we move on to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and William Harvey's animal experiments, designed to prove his theory of blood circulation and performed on live animals before the use of anesthetics—in ways that may make even a scientist convinced of the benefits of animal experimentation feel uneasy. The ensuing descriptions of Vesalius's practice of frequenting executions "in the hope of obtaining a body fresh from the gibbet" (p. 26), and of acquiring the body of a child stolen from its grave for use in demonstrations, come almost as mere gaudy anecdotes of welcome relief. In a more philosophical mood, the author then focuses on the vilification of Descartes by the animal liberation and animal rights fanatics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, before commenting on the Royal Society's publication in its Philosophical Transactions of Richard Lower's transfusion experiments with animals in the 1660s.

In the following century, fellows of the Royal Society, led by Hans Sloane and James Jurin, lent the authority of the Society to the smallpox inoculation practice initially imported from Middle Eastern folk medicine, using carefully chosen mild cases of smallpox as the source. The experiments, sponsored in London by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the then Princess of Wales, were fortunately successful: they involved first Lady Mary's three-year-old daughter, then Newgate prisoners and orphan children, and eventually the princess's own children. The practice known here as "engrafting" continued uninterrupted, for better or worse, until the very last decade of the century, when Jenner's cowpox vaccine, the variolae vaccinae, began its rise to power, initially proving its worth in vaccinations on child and milkmaid "volunteers"—experiments that would certainly never have been sanctioned by twentieth-century ethics committees.

In her concluding chapter, Guerrini discusses the wholly twentieth-century topics of polio vaccines, and Sabin and Salk; live-virus vaccines versus killed-virus vaccines; and tests involving human volunteers and "informed consent," or, where humans were not available, monkeys and great apes. The concept of "informed...

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