The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England

The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century EnglandAuthor(s): Anita GuerriniSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1989), pp. 391-407Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709568Accessed: 26/03/2010 17:34

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THE ETHICS OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

BY ANITA GUERRINI

Physiological research in mid-seventeenth-century England, after the appearance of William Harvey's De motu cordis in 1628, revolved largely around the problems he had introduced.' Harvey bequeathed to his suc- cessors not only new concepts but also his experimental approach to physiological research.2 The pivot of his research was thorough investi- gation of anatomy, both human and animal, via dissection, vivisection, and embryology. Animal vivisection was especially prominent in this research program.3

Harvey's successors in England-such men as Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Richard Lower, John Mayow, and a host of lesser figures- embraced wholeheartedly his experimental approach, as Robert Frank has detailed in his Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists. To this most of them added a distinctly mechanistic philosophy of a sort which the conservative Harvey strongly rejected.4 The Cartesian version of the mechanical philosophy, with which these men were familiar, both pro- vided a conceptual framework for their work and also seemed, at least from our perspective, to justify vivisectional practice. Descartes had as- serted that animals were mere automata and did not feel pain. In his Discourse on Method his notion of the beast-machine was a necessary corollary to the dualism of mind and body. In all creatures, the body

The author acknowledges the assistance of a summer post-doctoral fellowship in 1985 at the William Andrews Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles, and of grant no. SES-86-19503 from the National Science Foundation. As usual, Michael A. Osborne provided many invaluable comments.

On the Harveian tradition, see Theodore M. Brown, The Mechanical Philosophy and the "Animal Oeconomy" (New York, 1981); Robert G. Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley, 1980). On Harvey, see especially Gweneth Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (London, 1971); Walter Pagel, William Harvey's Biological Ideas (New York, 1967); Jerome J. Bylebyl, "Cardiovascular Phys- iology in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries" (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 1969); idem, ed., William Harvey and His Age (Baltimore, 1979); idem, "Boyle and Harvey on the Valves in the Veins," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (1982), 351-67.

2 Whitteridge, William Harvey, chs. 5-6 and passim; Frank, Harvey and the Oxford

Physiologists, 16-20. See also Joseph Schiller, "Claude Bernard and Vivisection," Journal of the History of Medicine, 22 (1967), 246-49.

3 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "vivisection" first appeared in 1707. My use of it is therefore somewhat anachronistic. I use it as a convenient shorthand for "experiment on living animals" and do not intend any pejorative con- notation it may later have accrued.

4 See Pagel, Harvey's Biological Ideas.

391

Copyright 1989 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.

392 ANITA GUERRINI

functions as a mere machine, without the assistance of any spiritual principles. "This will not appear in any way strange," he wrote, "to those who know ... how many different automata or moving machines the industry of man can devise"; for if man can be so ingenious, how much more cunning can God be? Unlike other creatures, man has a soul which enables him to reason. Animals do not: Descartes wrote, "it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, as one sees that a clock, which is made up of only wheels and springs, can count the hours and measure time more exactly than we can."5 Therefore, he answered Mersenne's query in 1640, animals do not feel pain, since pain could exist only with understanding, which animals lack. They only exhibit the external manifestations of pain, which are purely mechanical responses to stimuli. By this argument vivisection was not cruel, because animals were outside the realm of human ethical conduct.6 Centuries earlier, Thomas Aquinas had similarly argued that animals may be compared to clockworks and other automata in giving the ap- pearance of operating by reason and choice.7

Harvey's English disciples emphasized animal experiment, and par- ticularly vivisection. But little has been said about the attitudes this group displayed toward vivisection and toward animals generally. In 1968 Wal- lace Shugg published a paper on "Humanitarian Attitudes in the Early Animal Experiments of the Royal Society," which dealt with some of the issues and many of the individuals discussed here. As I shall note below, I disagree with Shugg's work in several respects. In particular, Shugg was not concerned to trace the origins of scientific attitudes toward animals in the more general philosophical discussions of the period on the moral status of animals; he cited only the arguments of Descartes mentioned above.8 In his recent book, Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas stated that attitudes toward animals began to change during the seventeenth century from the older utilitarian view of animals as the servants of man to a recognition that they, too, felt pain and even emotion. emotion. The treatment of animals therefore became a moral question.9 In this essay I wish to ask if, within a limited context, we can substantiate this claim with regard to vivisection.

5Rene Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (11 vols.; Paris, 1897-1913), VI, 55-56, 59; translation by F. E. Sutcliffe in Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations (Harmondsworth, 1968), 73, 75-76.

6Descartes, Oeuvres, III, 47-49 (letter 186, 1 April 1640), 85 (letter 192, 11 June 1640). See also Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine (New York, 1968).

7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q.xiii, art. ii. Cf. John Passmore, "The Treatment of Animals," JHI, 36 (1975), 201; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York, 1983), 33-36.

8 Wallace Shugg, "Humanitarian Attitudes in the Early Experiments of the Royal Society," Annals of Science, 24 (1968), 227-38, esp. 228, 237-38.

9 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, esp. chs. 3-4.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 393

Vivisection as an experimental approach has a long history, dating back as far as the presocratic physician Alcmaeon of Croton, around 450 BC.10 The Hippocratic corpus also gives examples of animal experiment." Aristotle performed animal dissection and perhaps also vivisection. He probably did not dissect human cadavers but described human anatomy by analogy to the anatomy of animals.12 His assumption of a morpho- logical similarity, a kinship, between man and beast led Aristotle's phil- osophical heir at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, to condemn animal sacrifice and even meat-eating. In practice, however, Theophrastus conceded only that unnecessary cruelty in the treatment or slaughter of animals should be proscribed.13 In the Roman era, Galen among others practiced animal vivisection, and his example and techniques influenced both Vesalius and Harvey."4 Public vivisections seem to have been common in ancient Rome. 1

The anthropocentrism of the early modern era has been attributed by Lynn White to Judeo-Christian theology, whose fundamental axiom, he says, is that "nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. "16 Critics of White's thesis have pointed out that an exploitative attitude toward nature has not been confined to the Judeo-Christian world.17 The Stoic argument, for example, repeated by Cicero and Seneca, stated that

10 Ludwig Edelstein, "The History of Anatomy in Antiquity," in Ancient Medicine,

ed. Owsei and C. Lilian Temkin (Baltimore, 1967), 247-301; Gary B. Ferngren, "A Roman Declamation on Vivisection," Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, ser. 5, 4 (1982), 272-90; "Roman Lay Attitudes towards Medical Ex-

perimentation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 59 (1985), 495-505; John Scarbor-

ough, "Celsus on Human Vivisection at Ptolemaic Alexandria," Clio Med., 11 (1976), 25-38; D. W. Amundsen, "The History of Medical Ethics: Ancient Greece and Rome," Encyclopedia of Bioethics, ed. Warren T. Reich (4 vols.; New York, 1978), III, 930-38; Richard D. French, "Animal Experimentation: Historical Aspects," Encyclopedia of Bioethics, I, 75-79. On Alcmaeon, see Edelstein, op. cit., 256; G. E. R. Lloyd, "Alcmaeon and the Early History of Dissection," Sudhoffs Archiv, 59 (1975), 113-47.

" Edelstein, "Anatomy in Antiquity," 253-54; G. E. R. Lloyd (ed.), Hippocratic Writings (Harmondsworth, 1978), 247, 347.

12 G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle (Cambridge, 1968), 73-74. 13 Edelstein, "Anatomy in Antiquity," 284-85; Johannes Haussleiter, Der Vegetarismus

in der Antike (Berlin, 1935), 237-45. 14 Galen, On Anatomical Procedures, tr. Charles Singer (London, 1956). 15 Ibid., 197-200; Ferngren, "A Roman Declamation," 279-80. 16

Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science, 155 (1967), 1207; cf. Passmore, "Treatment of Animals," 195-200. See also Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York, 1975), ch. 5, 202-34.

17 Lewis W. Moncrief, "The Cultural Basis for Our Environmental Crisis," Science, 170 (1970), 508-12; William Coleman, "Providence, Capitalism, and Environmental

Degradation," JHI, 37 (1976), 27-44; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980); John Passmore, Man's Re-

sponsibility for Nature (London, 1980), esp. ch. 1. Also see the recent survey by Jeremy Cohen, "The Bible, Man, and Nature in the History of Western Thought: A Call for Reassessment," Journal of Religion, 65 (1985), 155-72.

394 ANITA GUERRINI

man's rationality inevitably led to his domination of the rest of nature; beasts were made for man.'8 Christian theology was in any case not static, and by the seventeenth century theological justification could be found to support widely differing points of view.'9

Following the Galenic example of the newly-rediscovered On ana- tomicalprocedures, translated in 1531, Harvey's sixteenth-century prede- cessors in anatomy strongly emphasized vivisection. Vesalius relied upon animal vivisection for several of his conclusions and closed his Defabrica humani corporis with a chapter "On the dissection of living animals."20 I have found no written evidence of moral disapproval of the practice. Harvey, a successor of the Vesalian tradition at Padua, mentioned 128 different animals in his lectures on anatomy delivered between 1616 and 1624, and he detailed his own research on many of them.21 In De motu cordis Harvey described a great number of vivisections on a wide variety of animals, from eels to dogs.22 During Harvey's residence in Oxford in the 1640s several younger members of the university witnessed his methods first hand.23

Robert Frank has detailed the experimental program based on Har- vey's animal work, which flourished in Oxford from the 1650s, well after his departure.24 Simon Shaffer and Steven Shapin have argued that ex- periments became a more collective, public pursuit after the middle of the seventeenth century. They cite the use of expensive machines such as Boyle's vacuum pump as a contributing factor to this change. Access to such a device became public, in the form of witnessing experiments, but actual use was limited to a skilled operator. The laboratory thus became a "disciplined space" and the only site of authentic knowledge.25 After 1660, when the focus of the Harveian program shifted to the new

18 Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 14-15; "Treatment of Animals," 198, on the influence of Stoic arguments on such early Christians as Augustine. See also Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, 1967), ch. 3.

19 Coleman, "Providence, Capitalism, and Environmental Degradation," 28. 20 C. D. O'Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564 (Berkeley, 1965), 46-47,

117-18; Charles Singer, A Short History of Anatomy from the Greeks to Harvey (New York, 1957), 133-34.

21 F. J. Cole, "Harvey's Animals," Journal of the History of Medicine, 12 (1957), 106-7; William Harvey, Lectures on the Whole on Anatomy, tr. C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L. Poynter, and K. F. Russell (Berkeley, 1961), passim.

22 Cole, "Harvey's Animals," 108-9; William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Frankfurt, 1628), chs. 2-4 and passim. The basis of Harvey's discovery in vivisection is emphasized by Thomas Henry Huxley, "William Harvey," Fortnightly Review, n.s. 134 (1878), 167-90, cited by Bylebyl, "Boyle and Harvey," 357, n. 29.

23 Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 25-30. 24 Ibid., passim. 25 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle and

The Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), 38-40, 55-65, 283-331, and Hobbes's criticism of the limited audience at the Society, 112-15.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 395

Royal Society in London (although work continued elsewhere), it re- flected these changes in the character of experiment. Public experiment was another form of ceremony and display so prominent in early modern culture.

Live animal experiment required specialized skills and an audience of witnesses to verify experimental results. This collective affirmation was crucial since results of intricate experiments with live animals could vary greatly. The Royal Society's Journal Book as well as its Philosophical Transactions detail many public vivisections and their results. During the peak years of 1664-68 approximately ninety vivisections are recorded in Thomas Birch's eighteenth-century edition of the Journal Book, thirty- one of which were performed before the assembled Society.26 After this program diminished in the 1670s, vivisection remained an experimental standard but a private one.27 This shift away from a public setting occurred for several reasons. Public vivisection imposed technical limits of time and space on experiments which were not always desirable. Moreover, interest declined in the use of vivisection as a technique, perhaps on ethical grounds but also because of changes in the definition of significant knowledge.

Soon after hearing of Otto von Guericke's famous Magdeburg ex- periments of 1655, the ever-curious Robert Boyle commissioned the con- struction of a "pneumatick engine" which could create a vacuum chamber. Boyle resided in Oxford at the time, learning physiology by assisting at dissections and vivisections. A young undergraduate, Robert Hooke, demonstrated his mechanical flair by building a vacuum pump surmounted by a glass bell jar which could be evacuated.28 With this instrument, Boyle explored both the physical properties of the air and its physiological function. The latter problem had already engaged several of Harvey's heirs.29

Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke began their respiration experiments with the "pneumatick engine" in 1659 by placing a lark in the receiver and pumping out the air. The lark died, as did a sparrow and a mouse treated similarly. Over the next few years Boyle sacrificed a virtual hecatomb of animals-from cheese mites to ducks and cats-to the rigors of the vacuum. His Oxford lodgings, next to University College, must at times have resembled a barnyard. Hooke, in his capacity as "operator"

26 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (4 vols; London, 1756- 57), I and II.

27 Public vivisection continued to be pursued until somewhat later at provincial so- cieties such as those of Oxford and Dublin. See K. T. Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1970), 108-9.

28 Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (1660), in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols.; London, 1772), I, 6-10.

29 Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, passim.

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for the Royal Society after 1662, duplicated some of Boyle's animal experiments before that body, and Boyle performed others himself. Unlike experiments in mechanics, animal experiment could be unpredictable, messy, and noisy, demanding a different level of involvement from spec- tators. Boyle, especially, often ignored decorum; he once attempted to drown a duck before the assembled Society, periodically lifting it from the water to see if it was dead yet.30

Boyle expressed little concern about the fate of the animals subjected to his engine. In Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Ex- perimental Natural Philosophy (1663) he defended the practice of natural philosophy against critics who argued its incompatibility with Christian belief. In the wake of Hobbesianism and the revival of ancient atomism, Boyle was not alone in perceiving in the new mechanical philosophy a threat to established religion. But he found ample support in Scripture for his contention that the practice of natural philosophy was the sincerest form of worship for a good Christian. God gave man alone "that noble faculty called reason" and placed him "amidst a numberless variety of objects, that incessantly invite our contemplations." "Certainly," said Boyle, "we are wanting to our selves, and are guilty of little less than our own degradation," if we fail to exercise this gift with the practice of natural philosophy. Far from leading men away from God, he added, a knowledge of nature "excites and cherishes devotion."31

Boyle linked the notion of the contemplation of God's works as a religious act with the concept of stewardship. Just as propertied gentlemen like Boyle hired stewards to manage their estates, so too God entrusted man with the stewardship of His estate, the earth. Not only did God create man to explore and contemplate the world, but He created the world to be so used. Indeed, stewardship, said Boyle, implied a more active role for man than mere contemplation of the earth: "For it is no great presumption to conceive, that the rest of the creatures were made for man, since he alone of the visible world is able to enjoy, use, and relish many of the other creatures, and to discern the omniscience, al- mightiness, and goodness of their author in them." Thus Boyle resur- rected the Stoic argument for the human exploitation of nature and gave it a Christian gloss.32

30 Boyle, Works, I, 97-113, and "New Pneumatical Experiments about Respiration," Philosophical Transactions, 5 (1670), 2011-31, 2035-56.

31 Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural

Philosophy (1663), in Works, II, 9, 15. See also Coleman, "Providence, Capitalism, and Environmental Degradation," 29-30; Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Sev- enteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1958), 40-44.

32 Boyle, Works, II, 17. On stewardship, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 152-57, who interprets it (154) as barring unnecessary cruelty; Passmore, Man's Re-

sponsibility for Nature, ch. 2, who finds (29) "very little" support for the concept of

stewardship in Christian teaching. See below, n. 42.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 397

Boyle then applied this argument to justify vivisection in Part II of The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy. Perhaps a rise in anti-vivisectionist sentiment led Boyle to such a justification, but one should probably not read too much into this. He could have referred merely to squeamishness: he noted earlier that "though my condition does (God be praised) enable me to make experiments by others hands; yet I have not been so nice, as to decline dissecting dogs, wolves, fishes, and even rats and mice, with my own hands. "33 Boyle defended vivisection and animal experiment in general not only on the theological grounds of gaining knowledge about God's creation but also because such experiment afforded information beneficial to humans. In many cases experiments on humans would be the ideal, but this was in most instances impossible. In the sixteenth century Berengario da Carpi had harked back somewhat wistfully to the days of the Alexandrians: "For in our time anatomy is not practiced on living bodies, and yet the data would be found out much better in the living than in the dead, were it not that we recoil from such an enterprise because of its monstrousness."34 Boyle concluded, it is not "a small convenience to the anatomist, that he may in the bodies of brutes make divers instructive experiments, that he dares not venture on in those of men. "35 Shugg correctly identifies this attitude as "humanitarian "-that is, tending to the benefit of humans-but he confuses "humanitarian" with "humane" behavior in contending, in the example of the kitten given below, that Boyle extended his "humanitarian feelings" to ani- mals.36 Although Boyle was well aware of the works of Descartes, he did not mention the Cartesian argument in his justification of vivisection.

Boyle knew that animals felt pain. In his experimental accounts, he periodically noted an animal in pain or distress; he described a viper, for example, as "furiously tortured" under the influence of the vacuum. But he did not speculate on the physiology of pain, and his enthusiasm for investigation generally overcame his personal distaste. His accounts give little insight into actual experimental situations. Other experimenters at the time also mentioned the presence or absence of pain in animals: Edmund King found a sheep which had undergone blood transfusion to be "not at all concern'd at what she had endured in the Experiment." Carlo Fracassati, on the other hand, noted that after receiving an injection of vitriol, "the Animal complain'd a great while ... and observing the

beating of his breast, one might easily judge, the Dog suffered much. "37

33 Boyle, Works, II, 14. 34 Cited by Edelstein, "Anatomy in Antiquity," 283, n. 43. 35 Boyle, Works, II, 84, 67. Cf. Bylebyl, "Boyle and Harvey," 357, who argues that

Boyle failed to recognize the vivisectional basis of Harvey's discovery. 36 Shugg, "Humanitarian Attitudes," 230-31. 37 Boyle, "New Pneumatical Experiments," 2044; Edmund King, "An Account of

an easier and safer Way of Transfusing Blood out of one Animal into another," Philo- sophical Transactions, 2 (1667), 451; Carlo Fracassati, "An account of some Experiments

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Boyle himself was most tender-hearted on the topic of kittens, with which he proved Harvey's assertion that newborns, being accustomed to living without respiration, could better bear a lack of air. Of three kittens he used in an air-pump experiment he killed only one, and having brought another kitten to the edge of suffocation, he used a third for his next trial, "thinking it severe" he wrote, "to make him undergo the same measure again."38 Yet he justified such suffering as preferable to human

suffering for the advance of scientific knowledge. I do not mean to argue that Descartes's argument went unnoticed.

Leonora Rosenfield has amply illustrated the prevalence of his ideas of animal function in this period. But more influential in the context of animal experiment was the flip side of the beast-machine notion: for the mechanical philosophy, as Descartes realized, also implied that man, or at least man's body, was not unique and that the laws of mechanism applied to him as well. He made this view explicit in his Traite de 'homme, in which he described human physiology solely in mechanical

terms. An obvious corollary, expounded by La Mettrie in the eighteenth century, argued that man too was a mere machine.39 This removal of man from his privileged pedestal challenged the humanitarian foundations of vivisectional practice because it denied the notion that God had created the animal world exclusively for man's use. In his Philosophical Principles Descartes wrote, "such a supposition would, I think, be very inept in reasoning about physical questions." The Cambridge Platonist and An-

glican clergyman Henry More, no stranger to the Cartesian philosophy, also argued that nature was not made for man; for him, human kindness to animals reflected God's kindness to man. Thomas Aquinas had voiced this argument as a necessary corollary to the Christian stewardship of nature.40

The naturalist John Ray, who was well informed of events at the Royal Society, echoed More's arguments in his essay "De animalibus in genere," published in 1693, in which he attacked the Cartesian "beast- machine" notion. He too argued that God did not create the world for man alone; therefore, the idea that God would create automata for our uses, rather than creatures existing of themselves, was illogical, and

of injecting Liquors into the Veins of Animals," Philosophical Transactions, 2 (1667), 490.

38 Boyle, "New Pneumatical Experiments," 2017-19. 39 Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine, 141-46; Aram Vartanian, "Man-

Machine from the Greeks to the Computer," Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip Wiener (New York, 1973), III, 131-46, at 135-37.

40 Both cited by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 188. On More, see also Leonora D. Cohen, "Descartes and Henry More on the Beast-Machine," Annals of Science, I (1936), 48-61; on Aquinas, see Passmore, "The Treatment of Animals," 200-201.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 399

unworthy of his majesty.41 Ray maintained that animals showed con- sciousness and attention-though not rationality-and that their actions were more than automatic. Like Thomas Willis and indeed Descartes before him, Ray distinguished between a "corporeal soul" possessed by both man and beast and governing both voluntary and involuntary mo- tion, and a "rational," immaterial soul found only in man. Such a schema did not necessarily imply that animals were therefore somehow moral beings, although Ray may have concurred with Aquinas that "there is a certain likeness of moral good" in animals. It did explain such phe- nomena as the trainability of animals, which strict mechanism could not. Willis, one of the few experimenters to discuss the issue, found that the explanations of certain "famous Philosophers" who "suppose Brute An- imals to be only certain Machines ... seem not to satisfie a Mind desirous of Truth."42 He thought beasts were conscious but not rational, and he continued to vivisect. But Ray argued that the abhorrence which most people feel at animal suffering was itself proof that that suffering was real. "If it is argued that this is mere prejudice unworthy of a philosopher, then I shall stand by that prejudice," Ray asserted; "put it down to my stupidity or the weakness of [the Cartesians'] arguments as you like: the torture of animals is no part of philosophy. "43

Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza joined Ray in attempting to limit the applicability of Cartesian reasoning. Hobbes, like Descartes, believed that animals were "mere brutes," without understanding. But the world was not, therefore, necessarily created for man; human he- gemony over the beasts was based simply on superior power, in the same way that a monarch exercised his rule over his subjects. Thus, said Hobbes, man could justifiably kill or subdue animals for his own survival, as in the state of nature he could subdue other men. This was not an absolute or moral right but one based on power, and by this reasoning more powerful animals could justifiably kill men.44 In his Ethics Spinoza posed an argument which undermined both Christian and Cartesian reasoning:

it is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest

41 John Ray, "De animalibus in genere," in Synopsis methodica animalium quadru- pedum et serpentini generis (London, 1693), 12. See Charles E. Raven, John Ray Naturalist

(Cambridge, 1942), 466-67, who notes More's influence on Ray. 42 Ibid., 13; Thomas Willis, "Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes," in Dr.

Willis's Practice of Physick [tr. Samuel Pordage] (London, 1684), separately paginated, 1-3, 34-38; Aquinas, Summa, I-II, q. xxiv, art. iv. Vartanian, "Man-machine," 137, notes that the idea of a "corporeal soul" derives ultimately from Aristotle.

43 Ray, "De animalibus in genere," 11-12, as paraphrased by Raven, John Ray, 375. 44Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968),

part 1, ch. 14. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 171, points out that Hobbes echoes the classical vegetarian Porphyry.

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of what is useful to us teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow-men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to them as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone's right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still I do not deny that beasts feel: what I deny is, that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.45

These philosophical discussions of the nature of animals were not, as far as I have found, acknowledged by those English scientists who practiced animal experiment, with the exception of Willis. Even Ray only com- mented late in his career, when ideas about the moral status of animals were already changing. Boyle's attitude toward vivisection is more rep- resentative of his period, but other attitudes began to surface in the mid- seventeenth century. For example, Boyle's frequent experimental partner, Robert Hooke, expressed much less enthusiasm for vivisection than his mentor.

A participant in the vacuum pump experiments with Boyle, Hooke also engaged in vivisection of a more direct sort, in his famous respiration experiments of the mid- 1660s, which investigated the relationship between respiration and the central function of life, the heartbeat. Early versions of these experiments involved keeping a dog alive by the mechanical means of a bellows while cutting away the dog's thorax and diaphragm to observe the exposed beating heart. Hooke could keep the dog alive by this means for over an hour, and noted that as soon as the bellows stopped the dog's lungs collapsed and its heartbeat became irregular. Hooke reported the results of this privately performed experiment to the Royal Society, where it sparked enthusiastic discussion for two weeks, although no one volunteered to pursue this approach.46 In Oxford, how- ever, Boyle repeated this experiment, as did Walter Needham, who re- ported to the Royal Society a week after Hooke. Witness to these events was Richard Lower, a young Oxford physician and protege of Thomas Willis, who assisted both Boyle and later, Hooke.47 Lower, an especially enthusiastic vivisectionist, performed many other animal experiments both on his own in Oxford and before the Royal Society after he moved to London in 1666.48

45 The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, tr. R. H. M. Elwes (2 vols.; New York, 1951), II, 213 (Ethics, IV, 37).

46 Birch, History, I, 485-86 (meeting of 9 November 1664); Hooke to Boyle, 10 November 1664: Boyle, Works, VI, 498. Henry Oldenburg to Boyle, 10 November 1664: The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall (Madison, 1965-86), II, 296-97.

47 Needham's experiment: Birch, History, I, 489 (meeting of 16 November 1664). See Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 160.

48 For Lower, see Dictionary of National Biography and Dictionary of Scientific Bi-

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 401

Hooke was not happy with this act of vivisection, although he had suggested it. He complained bitterly to Boyle in a well known passage written after his first attempt at this experiment in November 1664: "I shall hardly be induced to make any further trials of this kind, because of the torture of the creature: but certainly the enquiry would be very noble, if we could find any way so to stupify the creature, as that it might not be sensible, which I fear there is hardly any opiate will per- form. "49 At about the same time, in his Micrographia, Hooke commented that the microscope beneficially empowered one to look at nature "acting according to her usual course and way, undisturbed, whereas, when we endeavour to pry into her secrets by breaking open the doors upon her, and dissecting and mangling creatures whil'st there is life yet within them, we find her indeed at work, but put into such disorder by the violence offer'd" that the accuracy of our observations is put in doubt.50

Hooke's delicacy may not have sat well with the members of the Royal Society, who followed Bacon's exhortations to force nature to yield her secrets. Such manipulations included "the dissection of beasts alive."" After unsuccessfully trying to foist the distasteful job of the open-thorax experiment onto someone else, who botched it, Hooke finally responded once more to the repeated pleas of the Royal Society.52 In 1667, three years after the original demonstration, he again took up his knife, this time with the help of Richard Lower, who had perhaps per- suaded Hooke to overcome his scruples for the sake of one experimentum crucis.53

In October 1667, before the full Royal Society, Lower and Hooke repeated the experiment of 1664 of opening the thorax of a dog and inflating its lungs with a bellows, again keeping it alive for over an hour. They then improved upon that experiment by attaching a second bellows

ography. He described many of his animal experiments in letters to Boyle between 1661 and 1666: Boyle, Works, VI, 462-81.

49 Hooke to Boyle, 10 November 1664: Boyle. Works, VI, 498. See also Margaret 'Espinasse, Robert Hooke (Berkeley, 1962), 52.

50Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) (facsimile, New York, 1961), 185-86, Obser- vation 43.

51 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1626) in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (14 vols.; Boston, 1860-70), VI, 246-47. See Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660-1700 (British Society for the History of Science, 1982), 48-52; Robert G. Frank, Jr., "Institutional Structure and Scientific Activity in the Early Royal Society," Proces du XIV Congres International de l'Histoire de Science, 1974, IV (1975), 82-101.

52 Hooke prevaricated from the beginning of May 1667 until October (Birch, History, II, 173-98). Edmund King unsuccessfully attempted the experiment on 18 July 1667, "the apparatus not being fit" (188).

53 Lower's influence is conjectured by Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 197-98.

402 ANITA GUERRINI

to the first, thereby providing a continuous stream of air, and pricked the dog's pleural membrane with a knife. The dog's lungs were now continually full, but motionless; yet the dog remained alive. Obviously the air itself and not the motion of the lungs was the crucial element in

sustaining the heartbeat. When Hooke and Lower stopped the action of the bellows, the dog began to convulse, and they successfully revived it. Finally, they cut off a piece of the dog's lung and showed the blood freely circulating. The experiment was judged to have "succeeded well, as it had done formerly."54

But John Evelyn, one of the observers, who vividly described the

experiment in his diary, found it to be "of more cruelty than pleased me." Shugg suggested that because Evelyn was "only a spectator," "his

display of feeling is to be expected," but other spectators did not similarly comment.55 Evelyn had owned dogs as pets-an increasingly popular practice in the seventeenth century-and in his diary he had also derided the "butcherly sports or rather barbarous cruelties" of dog-fighting, a popular spectator sport. Nonetheless, he did not object to animal exper- iment in itself; he reported on other canine experiments in his diary without disapproval. His objection rather appears to be to what he felt was gratuitous cruelty.56

Hooke could not be persuaded to repeat the open-thorax respiration experiment after the 1667 demonstration, although he continued to per- form other vivisections, most of them less violent. Richard Lower also continued to vivisect, and he played a major role in perhaps the best- known vivisections of the period, the transfusion experiments.57

The background of the transfusion experiments of the late 1660s is well known.58 The concept of transfusing blood from one animal to

54 Birch, History, II, 198 (meeting of 10 October 1667), further discussed 17 October

(200). See also "An Account of an Experiment made by Mr. Hook, of Preserving Animals alive by Blowing through their Lungs with Bellows," Philosophical Transactions, II, (1667), 539-40. Oldenburg erroneously dated the experiment 17 October 1667.

55 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, (6 vols.; Oxford, 1955), III, 497-98; Shugg, "Humanitarian Attitudes," 231.

56 Evelyn, Diary, III, 549. Reports of other experiments: III, 288-90, 403, 478. On

pet-keeping, Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 100-120. 57 Birch, History, II, passim. Two vivisections Hooke performed on pregnant dogs

seem as violent as the open-thorax experiment: 27 June 1667 (184), 18 December 1667, with Lower (232-33).

58 Harcourt Brown, "Jean Denis and the Transfusion of Blood, Paris, 1667-1668," Isis, 39 (1948), 15-29; Geoffrey Keynes, "The History of Blood Transfusion," in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), Blood Transfusion (Bristol, 1949), 1-40; A. Eyquem, "La transfusion est-elle possible avec du sang d'animal?" Histoire de la Medecine, quatrieme annee, no. 6 (juin 1954), 75-87; N. S. R. Maluf, "A History of Blood Transfusion," Journal of the

History of Medicine, 9 (1954), 59-107; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "The First Blood Trans- fusions," in Pepys' "Diary" and the New Science (Charlottesville, 1965), 55-99; Joseph Schiller, "La Transfusion Sanguine et les Debuts de 1'Academie des Sciences," Clio Med., I, (1965), 33-40; Jean-Jacques Peumery, Jean-Baptiste Denis et la recherche scientifique

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 403

another followed logically upon the numerous injection experiments with live animals performed in the 1650s and 1660s. Their relative simplicity- although some dexterity was necessary-and often dramatic results led to their great popularity at the Royal Society. The technique also had therapeutic potential. In this age of therapeutic bloodletting the concept of injection led soon to the notion of renewing and invigorating old or diseased blood with an infusion of new, healthy blood.

Animal-to-animal blood transfusion, first attempted in the mid-1660s, was not an unqualified success. Mortality among the experimental animals was high. The donor animals in the earlier attempts bled to death, and the recipients often succumbed to hemolytic reactions. But both John Evelyn and his fellow diarist Samuel Pepys witnessed several such ex- periments, and neither of them expressed an opinion that the experiments were cruel or painful.59 England and France competed intensely for prior- ity in this most dramatic of demonstrations. Inevitably, the operation was tried upon humans: a notable, and an unusual, attempt at human vivisection.60

Appropriate madmen were sought for the trials, whether because of the operation's supposed therapeutic effects or for some other reason. Hunter and Macalpine have commented that "the chronic insane have apparently always been regarded as a lost cause, and therefore proper objects for experiments"; but the therapeutic potential of the operation counted heavily with Jean Denis, the French transfuseur, although per- haps less so with his English counterparts.61 In England the warden of Bedlam, Dr. Thomas Allen, refused to allow his patients to be used as guinea pigs.62

In June of 1667 animal-to-human transfusion was first tried in Paris. Animals served as donors for several reasons. To find a human donor would be difficult at best, since the donor faced particular risk. Curiously, Denis believed that animal blood would have superior therapeutic value to the blood of a healthy human. He believed that temperate-living animals produced purer, more wholesome blood than humans; and by analogy with nutrition, animal blood would be more easily assimilated

au XVIIe siecle (Paris, 1971); idem, Les origines de la transfusion sanguine (Amsterdam, 1975); A. D. Farr, "The First Human Blood Transfusion," Medical History, 24 (1980), 143-62.

59 For Evelyn, see above, n. 56; for Pepys, see Nicolson, "The First Blood Transfu- sions," 63, 67, 76.

60 See A. C. Ivy, "The History and Ethics of the Use of Human Subjects in Medical Experiments," Science, 108 (1948), 1-5; Gert Brieger, "Human Experimentation: His- torical Aspects," Encyclopedia of Bioethics, II, 684-92.

61 Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London, 1963), 184; Farr, "First Human Blood Transfusion," 150-51.

62 Birch, History, II, 202 (meeting of 24 October 1667), 204 (meeting of 31 October 1667). For Allen, see William Munk, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (3 vols.; London, 1878), I, 361.

404 ANITA GUERRINI

than human. His first patient received nine ounces of lamb's blood, which apparently cured him of his fever and weakness; and Denis went on to transfuse at least three other individuals. His letter describing the first transfusion appeared in the Philosophical Transactions only a month later, in July 1667.63

In his commentary on this feat Henry Oldenburg claimed that English natural philosophers would also have attempted such an operation, "if they had not been so tender in hazarding the Life of Man ..." nor, more to the point, had they not been "so scrupulous to incur the Penalties of the Law, which in England, is more strict and nice in cases of this concernment, than those of many other Nations are." He cited a letter from Edmund King, one of those responsible for the trial which eventually took place, who wrote that "we have been ready for this Experiment this six Months, and wait for nothing but good opportunities, and the removal of some considerations of a Moral nature. "64 Such considerations remained unspecified, and were easily overlooked in the flush of scientific inquiry.

The experiment was performed in London on 23 November 1667, when a suitable subject was found. Suitability included several criteria. The subject chosen, Arthur Coga, an impecunious clergyman described by Oldenburg as "freakish and extravagant," might benefit from the therapeutic effects of transfusion. Moreover, Coga was neither so poor as to become a dependent of the Society nor so worldly as to consider legal action if the experiment failed. The transfusion seemed to succeed; the cleric appeared, in King's words, "very sober and quiet, more than before"; and perhaps more important, he did not become seriously ill.65 The experiment engendered great publicity, and "a great crowd of spec- tators" came to witness Coga endure a second transfusion.66 But human transfusion came to an abrupt end when a patient of Denis, a madman, died in January 1668. The Philosophical Transactions reported this with- out moral comment; indeed, Oldenburg noted with approval that mag-

63 Jean Denis, "A letter concerning a new way of curing sundry diseases by transfusion of blood," Philosophical Transactions, 2 (1667), 489-504, reprinted in Farr, "First Human Blood Transfusion," 154-62, who details its suppression by Oldenburg. Farr points out (150) that technical limitations probably prevented the recipient from receiving more than a few ounces of blood; Eyquem, "La transfusion," 82-83, states that incompatibility of blood types would only manifest itself in the second and subsequent transfusions.

64 "An Account of more Tryals of Transfusion," Philosophical Transactions, 2 (1667), 522 (misnumbered as 519).

65 Oldenburg to Boyle, 25 November 1667 (Oldenburg, Correspondence, III, 611-12); accounts of the experiment include: King to Boyle, 25 November 1667 (Boyle, Works, VI, 646-47) referring to the subject as "Dr Cogie ... his brain is sometimes a little too warm"; Birch, History, II, 214-15 (meeting of 21 November 1667), 216 (meeting of 28 November 1667); Edmund King, "An Account of the Experiment of Transfusion, prac- ticed upon a Man in London," Philosophical Transactions, 2 (1667), 557-59.

66 Birch, History, II, 225 (meeting of 12 December 1667).

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 405

istrates in England, unlike those in France, had given no thought to

forbidding the procedure.67 Members of the Royal Society still discussed the possibility of another English attempt at human transfusion a year after the death of the Frenchman.68

After 1670 the popularity of vivisection as an experimental technique declined, if we may judge by the number performed at or reported to the Royal Society.69 Several factors may account for this decline. Members of the active research group of the 1650s and 1660s dispersed, owing to

age or the lure of lucrative medical practices.70 In addition, the mood of the time was changing, and natural history and antiquarianism, which came to dominate the activities of the Royal Society by the late 1670s, perhaps better reflected conservative political trends than the adventurous

experimenting of earlier days. The Society's chronic lack of funds un-

doubtedly contributed to this change of emphasis. As an institution the

Royal Society seems to have been running out of steam. Beginning in 1667 the Society ceased to meet over the summer months, and these

holidays became longer and longer, from two months in 1667 to four in 1671. Even during the winter, meetings were often cancelled for lack of attendance. Michael Hunter has documented the decline in the Society's membership in the early 1670s.71

Vivisection, as we have seen, was often a public event. As public spectacles, the transfusion experiments and Hooke's open-thorax dem- onstrations were unparalleled, and contributed mightily to the perceived success of the fledgling Royal Society. Lower even referred to an exper- iment as a "tragedy" or drama.72 The transfusion experiments were the

piece de resistance, and the final failure of the French attempts had, I

believe, important ramifications for animal experiment in general. Not

only did transfusion experiments halt abruptly after the death of the French madman, but vivisection soon also declined. One may hypothesize

67 "An Extract of a Printed Letter, addressed to the Publisher, by M. Jean Denis," Philosophical Transactions, 3 (1668), 710-15, dated 15 May 1668, at 710. See also "An Extract of a Letter, written by J. Denis," ibid., 2 (1667/68), 617-22. See Brown, "Jean Denis," 23-25; Nicolson, "First Blood Transfusions," 89-94; Peumery, Transfusion San- guine, part 3. I am preparing a longer study of this case.

68 Birch, History, II, 339 (meeting of 14 January 1668/69). 69 Based on a survey of Birch, History, II (through 1671) and III (1672-79). 70 Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, ch. 11. 71 Frank, "Institutional Structure,"; Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical

Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 179-80; Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), esp. 39-43, and The Royal Society, ch. 3. Holidays and cancelled meetings: Birch, History, vols. 2-3, passim. See also Anita Guerrini, "Newtonian Matter Theory, Chemistry, and Medicine, 1690-1713" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana U., 1983), 26-30.

72 Richard Lower, De Corde ... (1669), tr. K. J. Franklin, in R. T. Gunther (ed.), Early Science in Oxford (14 vols.; Oxford, 1923-45), IX, 189, cited by Shugg, "Human- itarian Attitudes," 232, as an example of humane feelings.

406 ANITA GUERRINI

that a feeling arose that, in this case, the natural philosophers had gone too far; certainly the interrogation of Jean Denis by the Parlement of Paris in 1669 did not allay laymen's fears and criticisms, even though Denis was acquitted of wrongdoing in the death. The French court, while acquitting Denis, also ruled that further human transfusion would require the permission of the Paris medical faculty, permission which would not be forthcoming. This effective ban became a legal one in 1670.73

How much did overt opposition to vivisection on moral grounds influence its decline in England? Various radical religious sects of the 1650s had developed impassioned arguments against cruelty to animals. These arguments took a moral stance based on the kinship of man and beast, and probably did not influence natural philosophers.74 Nonetheless, as late-or as early-as the 1690s, the radical hatter Thomas Tryon advocated an end to meat-eating and blood sports on ethical grounds, urging his fellows "to decline that depraved Custom of Killing and Eating their Fellow-Creatures ... to live accordin [sic] to the innocent Law of Nature, and do unto all Creatures as they would be done unto." Tryon also argued that such activities made men insensitive and cruel.75 But in the 1660s those natural philosophers such as Hooke and Evelyn who expressed opposition took their stance on the basis of sentiment or aes- thetics rather than on moral grounds. Expressions of their feelings re- mained largely on a personal and private level, and they opposed not all vivisection but particular cases, especially open-thorax experiments.

Such private expressions of distaste were not confined to England any more than were the violent vivisections which provoked them. In Leiden the Danish natural philosopher Nicolaus Steno complained to his mentor Thomas Bartholin in 1661 of the necessity of inflicting pain on dogs in the course of physiological investigation: "I must admit that it is not without abhorrence that I torture them with such prolonged pain." This abhorrence did not deter Steno from continuing his experiments. But a young Dutch student, Frederik Ruysch, who witnessed several of these experiments, gave up vivisection in disgust and limited himself to the dissection of dead animals.76

In his letter to Bartholin, Steno commented, "The Cartesians take great pride in the truth of their philosophical system, but I wish they could convince me as thoroughly as they are themselves convinced of the fact that animals have no souls!!"77 The Cartesian "beast-machine"

73 See Brown, "Jean Denis," 23-26; Peumery, Transfusion Sanguine, part 3. 74 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 166, 290-92. 75 Thomas Tryon, Wisdom's Dictates; or Aphorisms and Rules, Physical, Moral and

Divine ... (London, 1691), 139; Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 150. 76 Frederik Ruysch, Dilucidatio valvularum in vasis lymphaticis et lacteis (1665), ed.

A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout (Nieuwkoop, 1964), Introduction, 34-37. I am grateful to Professor John Norris for this reference.

77 Ibid., 36.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 407

argument, which gave a philosophically logical justification for vivisec- tion, has often been referred to as the raison d'etre of vivisection in this period.78 In fact, as I have argued, this argument was not used as jus- tification by any English investigator in this period and by very few others. Most vivisectors realized that animals indeed felt pain. But on the grounds of the Christian concept of stewardship, they believed that pain was legitimately inflicted for the benefit of man and, as expressed by Boyle, for the glorification of God through natural philosophy. The "beast-machine" concept was, ironically, used most often by the anti- Cartesians of the eighteenth century to oppose vivisection. In his article Shugg concludes that animal experiment in the mid-seventeenth century was motivated by scientific curiosity or humanitarian urges and not by a desire to be cruel. I concur, but we need to go further. Humanitarian urges received crucial support from the Christian concept of stewardship; and the Cartesian argument was not ignored, as Shugg suggests, but confronted on several levels. The rise and decline of vivisection in this period had many and complex causes.79

Whether or not a cause of that decline, opposition to vivisection was expressed in this period, however equivocal or isolated the expression. This supports Thomas's contention that a new sensibility was arising, which became more generalized in the eighteenth century. By the 1690s an active anti-vivisection movement had taken root in France, and by the early years of the eighteenth century this sentiment had spread to England. When Stephen Hales began to vivisect animals after 1700, he found he could not pursue this activity with the same impunity enjoyed half a century earlier.80

University of California, Santa Barbara.

78 A standard argument of modern anti-vivisectionists; see, e.g., Singer, Animal Lib- eration, 10-11, 218-20; John Vyvyan, In Pity and in Anger (London, 1969), 22-24.

79 Shugg, "Humanitarian Attitudes," 237-38. 80 For the period after 1690, see Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine,

86-90, 201-2; Richard D. French, Antivivisection in Victorian Society (Princeton, 1975), 16-17; Michael A. Hoskin, "Foreword," to Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727) (London, 1969), xii-xiv; Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, 1968), esp. 103-9.