Antivivisection

“The leaders of the Victorian profession saw in experimental medicine a rigorous and demanding intellectual underpinning for the profession, one guaranteed to expose the incompetent and to awe the laity by its ‘scientific’ cachet and by a revolutionary new therapeutic technology. . . . The antivivisectionist indictment was thus based upon much more than medical support for experiments upon living animals. It was in fact a prescient foreshadowing of current critiques of the impersonality, the ethical insularity, not to mention the hypertrophied scientism, of modern medicine” (French, 411).