Baltimore Evening Sun (7 September 1911): 6.

From the last canto of the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society’s protest against my protest against its habit of hitting below the belt:

Mr. James M. Brown, president of the American Humane Association, writing in 1901 of the Berkley case, said: “For ourselves, we regard as utterly valueless all statements concerning the fate of the victims of human vivisection, which rest upon the unsupported word of the vivisector himself. Dr. W. W. Keen tells uys, for instance, that none of the patients experimented upon by Dr. X (meaning Dr. Berkley) died as a result of the experiments, but from other causes. Well, how do you know? From the evidence. Whose evidence? The word of Dr. X. Is he, then, likely to confess the truth whenever thta truth would make him liable to a criminal investigation? When an insane patient is choked or kicked to death by his nurses, in some lunatic asylum or hospital, does anyone expect them to come forward and tell how the ‘unavoidable accident’ really occurred? Will not the bruises be ascribed to a ‘fall’ and the broken bones to a ‘peculiar osseous friability’?”

Let us admit that this argument, for all its childish comparison of a Johns Hopkins man in good standing to rough-neck attendants in madhouses, is logically sound. Let us admit that it offers an intelligible reason for putting all medical experimentation under Government control–even under the control of a camorra of frenzied and ignorant “humanitarians.” But if it is sound, if it does make an appeal to reason, then why does the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society make such little use of it? Why does that society, on the contrary, make its actual attack upon Dr. Berkley by garbling his plain words, by deliberately and unfairly suppressing every syllable of his explanation, and by seeking to give the impression that he made no explanation at all? If the truth is too potnet, why doesn’t it stick to the truth? Why does it manufacture artificial evidence when actual evidence is at hand?

As for Mr. James M. Brown’s disinclination to believe the word of Dr. Berkley, I can only say that my respect for Dr. Berkley’s word is vastly greater than my respect for Mr. James M. Brown’s opinion. Here we come upon a matter of taste. Some folk give their allegiance to the man who adds to the world’s stock of knowledge; others swear by the man who adds to the world’s stock of flapdoodle. I belong to the one school; the pamphleteers of the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society to the other school. And so belonging, I am inclined to believe Dr. Berkley, Dr. Keen, Dr. Flexner and the others after their kind, great and small, while the anti-vivisection pamphleteers are inclined to believe Harndall, the horse doctor; Wilkinson, the Swedenborgian; Oldfield, the fruitarian; Gordon Stables, the cheap novelist; Anna Kingford, the astral aviator; Elliotson, the mesmerist; James, the spookchaser; Bell-Taylor, the numskull, and Ferrier, the ecclesiastical ass. Each to his choice!

The last strophes may now come together, as follows:

Dr. Keen, of Philadelphia, came, as you rightly recall, to the defense of Dr. Berkley (Yes, actually defended human vivisection!), but you fail to state–inadvertently, we trust, but perhaps through ignorance of the facts–that Mr. Brown, above referred to, in his subsequent reply utterly routed Dr. Keen. However, fundamental to the results of the experiments in the individual cases is Dr. Berkley’s expressed purpose in making these experiments. He clearly says that the favorable side of a certain line of treatment has been shown, and it is “directly for the purpose of ascertaining the toxicity of one of the best-known varieties of the thyroid extract” that the experiments were undertaken. No defense by Dr. Keen or explanation by Dr. Berkley himself can excuse this cold-blooded declaration of human vivisection. Truly, if the “common justice” you ask for Dr. Berkley had not been withheld he would long ago have been arraigned in the law courts. In closing we emphatically deny that we have not stuck to the truth. As we have said before, the burden of proof lies with with our accuser. We have taken the trouble to write to you at great length, because we trust that, whatever your own opinion on the subject of vivisection may be, you will be sufficiently fair to your readers to present the matter impartially to them, which as yet you have not done.

Behold the consistency of the anti-vivisectionists! On the one hand they deny that experiments upon animals can add the slightest new knowledge to the healing art as applied to man, and bring forward the affidavits of fivescore horse doctors, theosophists, novelists, actors, food faddists, ghost grabbers and yellow journal homiletes in support of their denial. On the other hand, they protest with wild eloquence against all experiments upon human beings. If experiments in both departments are to be forbidden, how are any advances to be made? Perhaps the anti-vivisectionists have an ansewr. Perhaps they are ready to meet the challenge of that London critic who lately proposed that they set up a physiological laboratory of their own and see how far they get in 25 years without either street dogs or moribund blackamoors to aid them!

But my war is not for vivisection, but against balderdash. I am perfectly willing to admit that the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society may have justice on its side when it demands the Open Door. I am perfectly willing to admit that vivisection may be abused by enthusiasts, as any other good thing may be abused. But the question before the house is not one as to the soundness of the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society’s central doctrine, but one as to the common sense and common fairness of its methods. I therefore put anew certain inquiries that it has not yet answered, to wit:

1. On what ground does it defend its deliberate mangling of Dr. Berkley’s report–specifically its removal of the words “the immediate cause of the exitus being an acute disseminated tuberculosis”?
2. On what ground does it defend its circulation of Ferrier’s idiotic nonsense, if, in point of fact, it does not ratify that nonsense?
3. On what ground does it put forward Harndall and Spencer, the horse doctors; Oldfield, the fruitarian; Gordon Stabler, the novelist; Wilkinson, the occultist, and Arabella Kanealy, the author of “Some Men Are Such Gentlemen,” as “eminent physicians” and “high authorities”?
3. On what ground does it deny that the diphtheria antitoxin is a valuable therapeutic agent, and if it makes no such denial, how does it think the antitoxin could have been perfected without the use of animals, and how does it think the antitoxin could be manufactured today without the use of animals?

Here are plain questions. Until they are answered in a simple and straightforward manner, without evasion or clouding of the issue, I shall waste no more space upon the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society.