Medicine: A. M. A. Flayed

In Manhattan last week twenty antivivisection, anti-inoculation, animal humane societies of the United States and Canada gathered at the semi-annual meeting of the International Conference for the Investigation of Vivisection to flay the medical profession. They inveighed against the practice of cutting open innocent little animals or filling them with nasty diseases. Said Charles Edward Russell,famed radical author and winner of the 1928 Pulitzer prize for Biography: “I suggest that we broadcast to the public a pamphlet challenging the American Medical Association directly. The doctors won’t meet us in a hearing because they’re afraid to bring the question in the open. Vivisection has never revealed anything of the slightest value to medical science.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Edward Russell, in saying this, might well be charged with ignorance; because:”

Diagnosis of tuberculosis of the bones and joints cannot be accomplished by microscopic examination of fluid or tissue; it must be accomplished by injecting the fluid into guinea pigs. If the human from whom the fluid was extracted had tuberculosis, the guinea pig will get it and the human can be treated for it.

The serum developed from animal experimentation for cerebrospinal meningitis has reduced by more than one-half the deaths from this infantile scourge.

Control and cure of diphtheria, rabies, yellow fever, typhoid fever, pneumonia, tetanus, and innumerable other diseases and pathological surgical conditions has been effected, like the above, by dealings with dogs and guinea pigs and rabbits.

Only six per cent of animal experimentation is true vivisection, i.e., dissection of living creatures; practically all of this dissection is performed with the aid of anaesthetics; over one-half of such animals are killed before they regain consciousness.