The Victorian Vivisection Debate ─ Frances Power Cobbe, Experimental Science and the "Claims of Brutes"

Is it justifiable for experimental scientists to impose a certain level of inhumanity upon live animals by subjecting them to open operations--forcing a few to suffer for the benefit of many? This work answers that question from both an historical and a personal perspective, expounding upon a debate playing out in Victorian England among experimental scientists, personified by Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Animal cruelty, both professional and on the street was ubiquitous. Journalist and reformer, Frances Power Cobbe, became so incensed by such acts that she devoted her political and legislative talents over a thirty year period to prohibit such activities. Struggling within the medical medievalism of the times was London surgeon Lister, hardly able to operate for fear his patients would succumb to sepsis. After reading of Pasteur's new theory about germs, Lister devised a system of antisepsis that slowly revolutionized hospital care.These two scientists and Koch further expanded the scientific base by experimenting further on animals As their methods improved, they transformed medicine into a beneficent force so obvious that it inevitably became institutionalized into British culture. No single adversarial movement, regardless of its level of idealism, could have held back the tide of modernism. In the latter chapters the author brings the debate up to the 21st century by analyzing modern-day animal rights theories, and offers a credo for those readers who remain undecided.

Theodore G. Obenchain is a retired neurological surgeon. He lives in Camas, Washington.