Antivivisection

”Antivivisection offered a way to resist the penetration of science into medicine. Reluctance to accept the new medicine did not derive from blind opposition to change. The image of the scientist . . . clashed fundamentally with the traditional role of the family doctor. Vivisection became the focus of the struggle to prevent the encroachment of science because in the vivisector’s laboratory scientific medicine came most radically into conflict with the older stereotype of the physician (Turner, 97-98) . . . In an age highly wrought up about pain, vivisection’s infliction of it became a moral evil of demonic dimensions. The admission of vivisection as a legitimate tool of science would dash faith in science as an instrument of moral progress and thereby undermine confidence in moral evolution itself (100) . . . Dangerous enough when confined to the laboratory, scientific materialism now threatened to infiltrate every home in the person of the trusted family doctor. The purity of medicine had to be preserved. This need explains the allegiance of antivivisectionists to the preachments of sanitary medicine long after bacteriology had done to death its claims. The sanitary reform movement had always tended to preach physical cleanliness as an adjunct to moral sanitation. Morality and physical health went hand in hand . . . To fight against ‘impurity,’ ‘pollution,’ and ‘filth’ . . . did not mean merely to build sewers. It was this side of sanitary medicine that really captured the minds of antivivisectionists (103). . . . Medical scientists therefore tried to bolster their image by stressing their professional kinship with ordinary physicians. However unsavory the reputation of physiologists, the public looked upon family doctors as warriors against pain, comforters of the afflicted” (111).