Unfeeling Brutes? The 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection and the Science of Suffering

Although somewhat sympathetic to animal protection efforts and bitingly critical of quackery and medical malpractice, Punch's contributors "maintained a faith in the ability of scientists to bring about real social progress," and defended them from slurs of brutishness (Noakes 96). In April 1877, the Home Chronicler, an independent anti-vivisection journal, published the poem "'Punch' among the Vivisectors" (760). These verses satirize the publication's apparent sympathy with experimental scientists by imagining Mr. Punch surrendering his loyal dog, Toby, to a pack of notorious vivisectors. The fourth stanza begins:

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •Now ruthless R_ _ _d may test,By his experiments so jolly,Which bears extremes of torment best,Poor Toby, or a shepherd's colley.

Ninety-cat-B_ _ _n^† might be triedIf he would rather choose to carve him;Another S_ _ _ _n might decide,Whether 'tis best to bake or starve him.

Says K_ _ _n to Punch, "If you invite,I've no objection, not the least;But, –as he possibly might bite,'Twere best to stupefy the beast."^*

The pitying public, too, might passO'er Toby's fate as less pathetic,If Punch would send some laughing gas,Which might act as an anaesthetic.• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

To fill in the blanks and thereby expose Toby's tormentors, readers needed to be au fait with a particular set of controversial admissions made by experimental scientists before the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection. The poem's footnotes (here marked by the asterisk and dagger) provided key excerpts from these statements to the commission, the proceedings of which were subsequently published by the government as blue books. The Scottish scientists Sir William Rutherford ("Ruthless Rutherford") and Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton are first to come under fire. The former is condemned for his infamous canine starvation trials, while the latter is derided for misinforming commissioners about how many cats he had used—"another Seven might decide / Whether 'tis best to bake or starve him." The reference to baking recalls the French vivisector Claude Bernard's reviled mechanism for studying death by heat as well as his description of the "science of life" as "a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen" (15). Finally, Croatian-born Emmanuel Klein—sometimes known as the father of British microbiology—is mocked for admitting that he only chloroformed cats to protect himself from bites and scratches (Report 330).

From its inception, the movement against live-animal experimentation tirelessly reshuffled, abridged, critiqued, and recirculated sections of the Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection (1876) in periodicals such as the Home Chronicler and the Zoophilist, and in pamphlets, literary works, and letters. Susan Hamilton has shown that by carefully reprinting a small number of set passages that reminded readers of key personalities and experiments, the movement sought to create a common print-culture; their propaganda strategy was rooted, as "'Punch' among the Vivisectors" indicates, in the "memorable and memorizable assemblage of pieces" ("Reading" 75; emphasis in original). Anti-vivisection organisations emulated the huge administrative efforts typically performed by the British government to compile, print, and disseminate blue books (Frankel). Thereby, they solicited memberships and donations, and reworked and reframed scientific research in ways that were accessible to non-scientific readers (Hamilton, "Reading" 67–68). The hearings attracted intense and remarkable media attention from a range of non-specialist periodicals and papers (Hamilton, "[T]o Bind Together" 137). Public anxieties about the growth of a more scientific medical practice were already mounting; surgeons and doctors were regularly accused of becoming desensitized to their patients' physical and emotional suffering, of being as cold and impersonal as the hospital ward. The first-person accounts elicited by the commission appeared to offer more direct access to experimenters' concealed emotions, which anti-vivisectionists suspected were either absent or fiendish. Readers were urged to sift through the Report themselves, extracting any inconsistencies or controversial admissions from the testimonies of leading scientists and medical men recorded therein. Fascination with physiologists' feelings, and the desire to uncover and measure them, [End Page...