Chapter XII: Part II (7)

Good accounts of Fraser's and Calmette's work are given by Dr. Stone in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, 7th April 1898, and by Staff-Surgeon Andrews, R.N., in the _British Medical Journal_, 9th September 1899. For other cases see the _Pioneer_, 10th August 1899, the _Lancet_, 25th November 1899, and the _British Medical Journal_, 23rd December 1899. In one of these cases, recorded by Dr. Rennie, the patient was, literally, at the point of death, but recovered after the serum had been injected. Two cases have also been recorded of cobra-bite during work in the laboratory: both of them recovered after injection. "Every Government or private dispensary," says Surgeon Beveridge, "should be supplied with antivenene, which is certainly the best remedy for snake-bite available." The cases are few at present; but it does not appear that the treatment has failed in any case; and, with a new remedy of this kind, it is fairly certain that failures would be published.

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From all these instances in physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and therapeutics, we come to consider the Act relating to experiments on animals in the United Kingdom. Many subjects have been left out; among them, the work of the last few years on the suprarenal glands and adrenalin, and Dr. William Hunter's admirable work on pernicious anæmia. No attempt has been made to describe the researches of experts in many countries into the nature of malignant disease, or to guess what may come of the discovery that mice can be immunised against that form of cancer which occurs in mice and is inoculable from mouse to mouse. Nothing has been said of the discovery that the African sleeping-sickness is due to a blood-parasite carried by flies from man to man. Nothing has been said about those discoveries in bacteriology that have not yet been applied to practice, or of the many inventions of medical and surgical practice that owe only an indirect debt to experiments on animals. Artificial respiration, the transfusion of saline fluid, the hypodermic administration of drugs, the use of oxygen for inhalation, the torsion of arteries, the grafting of skin, the transplantation of bone, the absorbable ligature, the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of electricity, the rational employment of blood-letting--all these good methods have been left out of the list; only some facts have been presented, those that mark most clearly the advance of knowledge and of practice, and stand up even above the rest of the work. There they will stand, when we are all dead and gone: and by them, as by landmarks, all further advance will be guided.