Baltimore Evening Sun (6 June 1913): 6.

The news that the Hon. Eugene Levering, the moral matador, has declared war on the picture called “September Morn” is lovely news, indeed, to every advocate of the true, the good and the aseptically beautiful. Without good Gene, Baltimore would sink into the awful abyss of Ninevah and Gomorrah. But saved by his ecstatic alertness, we maintain the high moral and intellectual level of a kaffeeklatsch.

Somehow them stuffers seems like they was having another one of them vacations, so to speak.

My excellent friend, the Hon. S. M. Farrell (who is, it appears, a lady, and as fair, I venture to hope, as she is pertinacious), has at me in today’s Letter Column to the extent of nearly a column, and the burden of her song, as usual, is that all medical men in good standing are scoundrels, and that all medical men in bad standing are meteors of virtue. Such pathologists as Dr. William H. Weleb, who are held in respect and esteem by all other pathologists, both at home and abroad, are false witnesses, ignoramuses and murderers. And such theosophists, zoophiles and spellbinders as Dr. Edward Berdoe, who are regarded as asses by all competent judges, are archangels, experts and genii.

This, in brief, is the way that the anti-vivisectionists always do their arguing, and let me say for it at once that it is a very ingenious and effective way, and that it seems to make an excellent impression upon the generality of the vulgar. But that it carries conviction to intelligent and educated folk I go so far as to deny--not loudly and arrogantly, perhaps, but still with considerable assurance. After all, the question whether a given medical witness is competent or not is chiefly a question for medical men to answer--and we all know how they answer it in the present case. The quacks of all sorts are on the side of the anti-vivisectionists: they see in the anti-vivisection jehad a fine chance to wallop the honest doctors. But the reputable physicians of the world, without regard to race or school, are overwhelmingly on the side of Pasteur, Ehrlich and Metchnikoff. Here in Baltimore, for example, there is not a single reputable physician who believes that the Pasteur hydrophobia vaccine is the fraud that the anti-vivisectionist “experts” maintain it to be.

It would be useless, of course, for me to go over Mrs. Farrell’s witnesses one by one, showing how this one is a notorious crank and that one is a notorious liar. In the case of many of them, I have done it in the past, and in the case of others their folly is too obvious to need elaborate pointing out. For example, there is Charles Bell Taylor, with his donkeyish “discovery” that the Pasteur “cure” is “not a cure at all.” Such discoveries are very easy to make--say that a dill pickle will not cure yellow fever, and you have made one. The truth to that the Pasteur vaccine is not put forward as a “cure,” that Pasteur never called it a “cure,” and that every educated physician in the world knows very well that it will not “cure” hydrophobia. When Taylor attacked it in the way he did, he revealed his ignorance of it and made a fool of himself--but it is precisely by making fools of themselves that snide doctors (chiefly homeopaths and eclectics) become the great “experts” and “world-famous authorities” of the anti-vivisectionist propaganda.

So much for what may be called the positive side of the campaign; its chief device is the creation of bogus Ehrlichs and Welches out of theosophists, Christian Scientists, “fruitartans,” novelists, actors, the presidents of Browning clubs, plain liars like Dr. George Wilson, and other such booming numskulls. On the positive side its favorite artifice is to distort and exaggerate the statements of pathologists of undoubted repute, so that they are made to lambast one another idiotically, or to deny the efficacy of methods and remedies in universal use by educated medical men, or to recommend devices that are obviously outrageous and nonsensical.

In Mrs. Farrell’s letter you will find several characteristic examples of this second method, at which she is a famous adept. She tries to make it appear, for example, that Dr. Metchnikoff is bitterly at odds with Pasteur’s notions regarding the useful part played by living organisms in the process of digestion. To this end she quotes an alleged article from the New York Times of March 5, 1911, alleging to give the exact words of Metchnikoff. But what are the facts? The facts are, as everyone familiar with Metchnikoff’s ideas knows, that he is thoroughly convinced of the importance of such organisms in the digestive tract, and that he even proposes to plant them there when they are lacking in numbers. In brief, he is an ardent advocate of the very ideas that Farrell makes him denounce, and she is very well aware of it.

Again, there are the quotations from Sir Almroth Wright and Besredka, and the alleged accounts of views held by Welch, Flexner and other undoubtedly competent men–each without its context, each deliberately and mendaciously stripped of its qualifications and its true meaning. In the very same way a great many other honest men are brought into court by the anti- vivisectionists--always to their vast surprise. For example, Dr. W. S. Halsted, of the Johns Hopkins medical school, is constantly cited as a foe to experiment, and yet everyone knows that Dr. Halsted is nothing of the sort. This mountebank’s trick of distorting and sophisticating evidence is one at which Mrs. Farrell excels, and on June 1, 1912, she was publicly denounced for it by the New York Sun. I can do no better, indeed, than quote from the Sun’s article, for it states very plainly the difficulty of arguing with such a suave and persistent false witness. Thus:

It is clear that there is no use in attempting to demonstrate the falsity of such distortions. Those who cannot see it at a glance are not to be convinced by argument. Their standards of truth and candor are original and peculiar. * * * When it comes to supporting themselves by quotations they are as justly confident of their authority as the ahtiest who maintained that he had the authority of Holy Writ for his simple statement: “There is no God.”

By a curious coincidence, the wrath of the Sun was provoked by a gross distortion of a report by Dr. Hideyo Noguchi on his experiments with dead spirochæte pallida. Despite the exposure of the trick, Mrs. Farrell is still using her version of the report in argument, and you will find it mentioned in her letter today. Exposure does not daunt an anti-vivisectionist. The same old lies and nonsense do duty for the cause over and over again.

Boil your drinking water! Watch Bob come back! Don’t let Anderson go! Swat the fly!