Antivivisection

“Language, in fact, may provide one key to understanding antivivisectionist distrust of medical investigators. Physicians . . . described experiments on sick or dying children and invalids with clinical detachment. The language of these research papers chilled antivivisectionists, who attempt to turn it against their opponents. . . . But, in their extreme way, antivivisectionists articulated a disquiet about the professionalization of American physicians that was shared by other segments of American society. The growing centrality of the hospital and the introduction of a medical reductionist technology played an important role in this professionalization. The increase in the number of lawsuits over consent in surgical procedures, for example, reflects an uneasiness about the doctor-patient relationship in a time in which physicians were realizing powerful therapeutic tools unknown to an earlier generation of physicians. The antivivisectionist partiality to sectarian practitioners, whose reliance on older types of medical explanation was well known; their criticism of compulsory vaccination, which superseded individual autonomy; and their indictment of the physician-turned-scientist reveal the polarity in attitudes between antivivisectionists and medical researchers” (Lederer II, 47-48).