Antivivisection

“An animalistic obsession with bodily health could be the only basis for entertaining such an argument, for disease was the divinely ordained consequence of sin and folly, and was to be borne as such. . . . The ubiquity of this kind of argument in antivivisectionist controversy reveals to us a segment of Victorian opinion for whom medical advance, regardless of source, appeared as a tampering with the order of things, an unwarranted intrusion of rather distasteful medical doctrine into Public consciousness” (French, 306). “The argument from the divine design of the universe was predicated upon the world view of natural theology and a vague preference for the naive inductivism associated with it. . . . Arguments like these as a rationale for hostility toward experimental medicine provide a link to antiscientific sentiment also expressed by members of the movement. . . such sentiment was based in part upon the belief that the scientists of the seventies and eighties had sacrificed the humility of the natural theological viewpoint for an overweening self-importance that failed to take account of the divinely appointed limitations to science” (317, 318; 355 ). . . . The movement’s basic line of argument “centered on the rejection of so-called ‘scientific medicine,’ the veneration of a personal, humane style of medicine directed toward the relief of the sufferings of individual patients, and the promotion of a naïve sanitarianism, in which a confusion of dirt, disease, and sin was juxtaposed with a similar confusion of cleanliness, health, and moral restraint. The experimental approach and the belief that the advancement of knowledge was fundamental to the professional obligation seemed to antivivisectionists a sinister and threatening attempt to disjoin material phenomena of bodily function from the moral and religious foundations of which they were the outward manifestations” (343).