VIVISECTION (from Lat. virus, alive ± sectio, a emitting, from secare, to cut). A term originally employed to designate cutting, opera tions living animals for the purposes of experimentation, but now broadened to include experimentation of any kind, painful or pain less, to demonstrate or discover physiological facts or theories, upon living creatures. Those experiments comprise inoeulation with disease, subjection to different eonditions of temperature, atmospheric pressure. or food, or to the action of various drugs and medicines, as well as to put ting operations involving the ligature of arteries, exposure of nerves, or removal of vital organs. Physiological investigations on living animals were earried out by Galen and the Alexandrian school, and all the important I liseoveries during the later centuries of the Christian Era were made in this way. The method was accepted as a necessary means to scientific knowledge until the nineteenth century, when the widely pub lished and needlessly cruel and numerous experi ments of Majendie and other investigators in France, Germany, and Italy, caused public dis pleasure. Persistent agitation in England re sulted in the appointment, in 1876, of a royal commission to investigate the subject of vivi section in that country, and the passage of the Vivisection Act, which regulated, and to some extent restricted, the practice. Experiments per formed for instruction were, in particular, per mitted only under stringent limitations. In vertebrate animals were not protected, but horses, dogs, mules, asses, and cats were especially safe guarded. An active propaganda for the total suppression of vivisection has been steadily main tained in Great Britain and in the United States. Anti-vivisection protests include objections to alleged experimentation upon human beings in pauper hospitals and insane asylums. The chief argument against vivisection (based mainly on the undoubtedly cruel experiments carried on before the clays of anresthetics) are that the prac tice is unnecessary and cruel.
The whole weight of scientific opinion is in favor of vivisection conducted in a humane man ner. Experiments as at present performed in volve no avoidable suffering. Cutting operations are done under complete anesthesia, with ether or chloroform, as in the human subject. Ani mals seriously mutilated are killed before re gaining sensibility. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by the infliction of pain, in the conduct of most experiments, and the in vestigator, for this reason, if for no other, is led to avoid it.
The benefits to mankind derived from animal experimentation are incalculable. Practically all our knowledge of physiology, of the effect of medicines, and of bacteriology is gathered from this source, and there is hardly a life-saving or pain-relieving appliance, measure, or operation that has not been directly derived through vivi section. Only a few benefits derived from it can be mentioned here. The whole subject of the circulation of the blood, of transfusion of blood and saline fluids, was worked out on ani mals. All the facts concerning respiration were discovered in the same way, and the practical ap plication of the knowledge thus derived has led to the life-saving procedure of artificial respira tion in cases of asphyxiation from gases, drown ing, hanging, and poisoning, to the use of oxygen in cases of failing respiration, and to the science of ventilation. The functions of the nerves, spinal cord, and brain and the location of the various nerve centres are among, the most difficult and important problems solved by vivisection. The treatment of aneurism by ligature, the repair and transplantation of bone, skin-grafting, ab sorbable ligatures, the arrest of hemorrhage by torsion of the arteries, the epoeh-making dis covery of general ana'sthesia, the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of electricity, hypodermic medication, and the phenomena of inflammation are examples of the usefulness of animal ex perimentation. The immense advances in our knowledge of contagions and infections diseases, their bacteriology, and their prevention, were made through vivisection. Diphtheria antitoxin, which has saved thousands of lives, and the various other antitoxic serums (sec SERUM THERAPY ) are products of the same method of investigation. These benefits are practical, and from a humanitarian as well as a scientific point, of view outweigh many times the pain inflicted on animals and the destruction of animal life. See Paget• Experiments on .Inimots (London and New York, 1903) : Lellingwell, The I irisce lion Question (New Haven, Conn.. 19(11), and numerous articles in English and American magazines. The principal English antivivisec tion organs are the Zoophi/is/ and tbo/itionist.