Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (review)

Anita Guerrini has written a compelling and engaging account of the ways experiments have been conducted on animals and humans from the time of Galen to the present. Her book is crucial not only for understanding the changing value placed on experiments over time but also because it invaluably deepens our knowledge of the history of medicine. Guerrini's emphasis on animal and human experiments provides a fresh and new dimension to well-told histories in medicine, such as Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood, smallpox vaccination, and the development of the polio vaccine.

Guerrini's overall objective is not to examine the "conflict between science and ethics" but rather to show that the values of science are bound up with the "values of the society it inhabits. Science is a privileged enterprise only insofar as society allows it to be" (p. xi). The story she puts forward is one of scientists conducting experiments circumscribed by the constraints of trial and error, changing prejudices and religious beliefs, as well as financial limitations.

The book starts with an examination of the philosophical arguments that raged for and against dissection and vivisection in antiquity. Critics believed such practices revealed more about death than about the living. Advocates, on the other hand, saw dissection and vivisection as means of gaining knowledge about the natural world and understanding how the body worked, knowledge that they saw as essential to medicine. Horror of the mutilation of a dead body, however, severely limited the practice of dissection and vivisection throughout much of this era.

Many of the arguments put forward for and against dissection and vivisection during antiquity continued in later periods. During the sixteenth century the debate took on a new dimension with the emergence of ideas that promoted animal and human bodies as machines that could be analyzed in mechanical terms. This change took place against a new sensitivity and awareness of animals, raising questions about the ability of animals to feel pain and their hierarchical status in relation to humans. Some critics also questioned the validity of animal experimentation, seeing the human body as unique and not comparable to that of animals. Such views continued in later centuries.

Later chapters focus on the rise of animal and human experimentation with the emergence of vaccination and the development of bacteriology and laboratory medicine. Guerrini deftly shows the central role that animal bodies played in bacteriological and immunological research from the time of Pasteur and Koch, becoming "receptacles," much like dishes of gelatins used for studying microorganisms (p. 97). Some of the most grueling and compelling reading in the book concerns the part played by monkeys in the making of the polio vaccine. During the 1950s at least 4000 monkeys were sacrificed a month to ensure the production of polio vaccine. Similarly harrowing reading is the case of the monkeys used in psychological experiments from the 1970s.

Any reader of Guerrini's book will need a strong stomach. What is striking, however, is her ability to illustrate the dilemmas posed by animal and human experiments without casting judgment on those who conducted the experiments or those who opposed them. As she points out, many of the tensions that emerged over animal and human experiments were not straightforward and were strongly shaped by social and scientific values of the time.