The Press: Bark & Bite

When a dog show opened in Chicago last March, the National Society for Medical Research—long a target for the Hearstpapers’ antivivisectionist crusades—staged a counteroffensive. The society put on its own exhibit, where dog lovers could watch four dogs from the laboratories of Illinois universities. The doctors wanted to show that experiments had not made the dogs miserable.

Hearst’s Chicago Herold-American made the most of this opportunity to catch the “torturers” redhanded. Its headlines: FLAUNT PET TORTURE AT DOG SHOW! VISITORS SICKEN AT CRUEL SIGHT. A picture of a dog named Fluffy, which had a tube connecting its stomach to a pouch collecting gastric juices, was captioned: “In helpless torment, deprived of even the relief of barking a protest, Fluffy can only gasp in grip of [the University of Chicago’s] Dr. N. R. Brewer.” Another picture on the same page showed a dog on which a prostate operation had been performed. The Hearst legend: “Unspeakable sadness is burned deep in the eyes, the hopeless expression of Fritz, caught in torturers’ trap . . .”

This was more than the research society could stand. In the name of Dr. Brewer, the “tormentor” of the caption, the society’s lawyer filed a $1,000,000 libel suit against Publisher Hearst and the Herald-American, brought suits in Chicago’s Federal District Court on behalf of two other members. This week the society announced that two more suits would be filed, boosting the grand total in damages sought to $2,900,000. If they collect, the plaintiffs said they would use the money to make a movie depicting the medical advances achieved through vivisection. Said famed Physiologist Anton J. Carlson, president of the society: “Medical science . . . refuses to be the goat any longer for the ugliest and most baseless vilification campaign of our times.”