Baltimore Evening Sun (19 February 1912): 6.

Pessimistic remark of the Hon. Bill Broening, State’s Attorney of Baltimore City:

If we should institute proceedings here, General Vandiver could say that the contributions were received by mail at his home in Havre de Grace, and the case would fall of its own weight.

Of course he could, but would he? In brief, what ground has Bill got for his easy assumption that Murray is an Ananias?

Don’t worry about Murray none. Murray himself ain’t botherin’ none.

The standing of the clubs in the National Typhoid League for the week ending January 27, as given in the Public Health Reports:

Baltimore.........................537 Boston........................149
Philadelphia.....................259 St. Louis.....................145
New York........................209 Pittsburgh...................000
Chicago...........................183 Cleveland...................000

So give three cheers, and three cheers more, for the gallant captain of the Baltimores! Again our beloved club is in first place, its natural and traditional position. The Pittsburghs, once a rival, now disappear from the contest. The Philadelphias, once so formidable, now show a percentage less than half that of the Orioles. All is well. Hypochlorite scores again.

The roster of carcasses In the charnel house of boomery:

The Star-Spangled Banner Exposition. The bridge across the Chesapeake. The Quarles Dickey charter. The See-America First Convention. The massmeeting of booming schoolchildren. The neighborhood carnival movement. The Cuba steamship line.

Four months ago them stuffers was so skeered they couldn’t hardly sleep none at night, but now you can hear ’em snorin’ two or three blocks.

Next comes a Vice Crusade! Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

Only 40 days more of rumble-bumble and slobber-gobble at Annapolis! Let us give thanks to Cadmus, the Phœnicians, or whoever it was that wrote the Constitution of Maryland!

A pair of pulse-warmers to any man or woman, not obviously insane, who believes that it will be at all difficult to get a drink at Back River on any Sunday evening of next summer.

Good novels to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon:

“The Gods and Mr. Perrin,” by Hugh Walpole. “The Song of Renny,” by Maurice Hewlett.

An article by Dr. Woods Hutchinson in the current issue of The World’s Work throws an interesting light upon the highly moral mendacity of the anti-vivisectionists, a subject to which I have often referred. The average anti-vivisectionist, it is to be assumed, starts out with perfectly good intentions. His object is merely to prevent needless cruelty to animals, and it is undoubtedly a good one. But before long he begins to add enthusiasm to good intentions, and frenzy to enthusiasm--and after that it is utterly impossible to believe him. On the one hand, he boldly accuses pathologists of crimes they never commit; on the other hand, he suppresses or distorts their explanations and defenses; and on the third hand, as it were, he denies absurdly and hunkerously the enormous and obvious value to suffering humanity of experiments upon animals.

Argue with an anti-vivisectionist 10 minutes and you will have him in such a position that he must either admit that experiments on animals have been infinitely valuable to man, whatever the discomfort to the animals, or maintain that such things as the smallpox and hydrophobia vaccines and the diphtheria and meningitis antitoxins are without virtue. Let it be said to his credit that he seldom hesitates about his choice. Already committed to one absurdity, he quickly embraces the other. That is to say, he openly derides the whole of modern medicine, maintaining that the hydrophobia vaccine is a snare and the diphtheria antitoxin is a fraud. And so he joins the League for Medical “Freedom,” that seminary of wind-jammers, and sets himself up as one who knows more about medicine than Dr. Welch.

But to return to Dr. Hutchinson. His article tells of a visit he paid to an Anti-Vivisection Exhibition., and of the astounding things he was told and shown by the old maids in charge of it. One of them, for example, showed him a picture of “an apparatus for spraying curari into the mouths of animals, to render them helpless while they are being experimented upon.” Dr. Hutchlnson took a close look. What he found was that the instrument was an ordinary atomizer, such as is commonly used for spraying sore throats! All the balderdash about the curari was invented by the attendant virgin!

Again, Dr. Hutchinson was shown “a forceps for holding rats by the ear while they are being vivisected." A glance at it showed that it was a commonplace surgical sponge-holder–“a little metal rod with a handle at one end and an adjustable clamp at the other, to catch a small sponge used to swab out the blood during an operation upon the nose or throat.” Yet again, an oven in which “cats were baked to death in order to see their arteries swell up and burst”--a truly amazing experiment!--turned out in be “an ordinary incinerator, or garbage furnace, such as is used in laboratories for destroying infected dressings, cultures” and other such stuff.

But Dr. Hutchinson’s greatest surprise came when he was shown, in a catalogue of surgical goods, a picture of a rabbit stretched upon its back upon a board, with its legs extended and held down by a pin driven through each foot. “This,” said the attendant sob-squeezer, “is what we call our Crucified Rabbit.” “Is it alive?” asked Hutchinson doubtfully, for the pins seemed too fragile to hold an active rabbit. “Oh, yes,” replied the fair one. “Certainly. If it were dead we shouldn’t have the slightest objection.” Then the iconoclastic Hutchinson took a closer look at the catalogue. This is what he found opposite the number corresponding to the picture:

Dissecting Board. Size A, for rabbits, 3 marks; size B, for rats, 2 marks.

And thus passed the day, one absurdity being piled upon another. Did the fair one change the labels after their errors had been pointed out? You may bet your bottom dollar that she didn’t. Say what you will against the anti-vivisectionists, you must always admit that they have the courage of their own grotesque convictions. Once they arrive at a new and super-startling lie, they stick to it to the end of the chapter.