Vivisection Films

A company of pallid medical students in an overlighted surgical theatre, peering round-eyed, in sadistic ecstasy, while an instructor surgeon, cowled and gloved, removed and lectured upon the guts of a tortured dog. This gruesome spectacle, set forth in all its horrid details in the pages of the more mawkish journals, has induced many a kind-hearted madame to weep into her breakfast dish of tea, has spurred many a feeling gentleman to dash off a letter of protest to an editor. Quite rightly. For however luridly exaggerated by popular imagination, the fact that it is occasionally necessary to cause suffering in one animal in order to save many men from like anguish is none the less to be deplored. Instructional vivisection is at best but a clumsy means of imparting surgical knowledge. The experiment can be followed by only a limited number of students; it must inevitably be somewhat hurried. Long have medical men sought for some instrument of instruction between a live guinea-pig and a lifeless diagram. Last week, in Paris, the cinema was turned to this purpose. Professor Lapique of the Paris Medical School presented a film featuring the vivisection of a dog. Medical students looked on, took notes, asked questions. Announced in the press next day, the event gave rise to no lamentations, no letter-writings.