WIKICOMMONS
England, 1876. Researchers are in a state of panic. A bill to ban all animal experiments, except those certain to lead to knowledge useful in saving or prolonging human life, is moving rapidly toward legislative approval.
According to historian Richard French, the editor of the British Medical Journal mobilized the medical community, and led a “spectacular deputation of several hundred medical men”—including the discoverer of the difference between typhus and typhoid, physician William Jenner—to the Home Office. Their evidence led to rewriting the bill to allow the use of animals in experiments for the advancement of physiological knowledge and the alleviation of either animal or human suffering.
This account offers a lesson for today’s researchers, physicians, and patients. Arguments made by researchers failed to stem ...
