Drawing the life-blood of physiology: vivisection and the physiologists' dilemma, 1870-1900.
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Skull growth is affected by numerous factors, including dentition. Animal experiments have assumed considerable importance in connection with such studies. This series of publications deals with the response of the skull skeleton and masticatory muscles to extraction of each emerging tooth in the right half of the jaws of Vietnamese belly pigs. The animals were slaughtered at various ages ranging from 6 to 12 months, throughout an important phase of post-natal skull development. Biomathematical methods were used to analyse the macerated skull and the masticatory musculature. Linear differential equations have proved useful for describing growth processes. The 1st report deals with the distances measured for the overall and rear skull, the orbita and the zygomatic arch. Differences between the right and left sides are slight with respect to these distances. Significant differences were found only in the range of the front part of the zygomatic arch during the 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th and 12th month of life.
Reaction against vivisection for research reached its height in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th, and a resurgence began in the 1960s. Antivivisectionism was and is related, in part, to emphasis on humanitarian sentiments. Two humanitarian physicians defended vivisection as essential. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in 1886 justified the killing of rabbits to relieve human suffering from hydrophobia. In 1910, he objected to the antihuman campaign of the antivivisectionists. Dr. William Osler reacted similarly to the threat to vivisection. He gave emphatic evidence to investigative committees in the United States in 1900 and in Britain in 1907. Osler also performed vivisection. His experimentation included studies of pig typhoid and tapeworm cysts in pigs and of the fate of india ink injected into the lungs of kittens. Osler and Conan Doyle were but two of the many prominent physicians who helped stem the tide of antivivisection legislation near the turn of the century. A review of the elements that fostered antivivisectionism in the society of their time is relevant in understanding and reacting to similar sentiments in the present era.
PURPOSE: To describe the current situation of Brazilian regimentation for use of animals in teaching and in scientific research. METHODS: It was identified and discussed the legislation about the use of animals in teaching and in scientific research in Brazil and in Rio de Janeiro State. RESULTS: There is not an updated general and systematizing rule with focus on animal vivisection and experimentation, neither for didactic nor scientific purposes. The only specific law dates from 1979 and it was not regimented. More recent laws equate the practice of scientific experiments to the abuse acts and bad handling of animals, when exists alternative technology. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, vivisection practice and experimentation with animals in public veterinary institutions is forbidden since 2001. Currently, there is a substitutive in discussion at the Chamber of Deputies as a result of the evaluation of more recent law projects, representing an inestimable advance without however corresponding to a body of principles and directives that can adequately guide the question. CONCLUSION: In our country there is not regimentation for using animals in teaching and in scientific research. It becomes imperative to make lucid and realistic arrangements which can assure the continuity of the use of animals. The scientific community is ready to contribute to that purpose.
Hippocrates was the first physician to use the scientific method to find rational and not religious or mythic causes, for the etiology of diseases. Hippocrates and Aristoteles did not dare to dissect the human body. Afterwards however, many scientists such as Herophilus, Erasitastrus, Vesalus and Fallopio, performed experiments in human beings using vivisection. According to that age's ideas, there was no cruelty in performing vivisection in criminals, since useful knowledge for the progress of medicine and relief of diseases was obtained. Only during the nineteenth century and with Claude Bernard (1865), the ethical principles of systematic scientific research in humans were defined. These principles were violated by nazi physicians during Hitler's dictatorship in Germany (1933-1945). As a response to these horrors, the Ethical Codes of Nuremberg (1947) and Geneva (1948), that reestablished all the strength of Hippocratic principles, were dictated. The Nuremberg rules enact that a research subject must give a voluntary consent, that the experiment must by necessary and exempt of death risk, that the research must be qualified and that the experiment must be discontinued if there is a risk for the subject. The Geneva statement is a modernized hippocratic oath that protects patient's life above all. These classical rules, in force at the present time, are the essential guides that must be applied by physicians and researchers.
There are human beings whose psychological capacities are rivalled or exceeded by many non-human animals; such humans are often referred to as 'marginal cases'. R G Frey has argued that there is no secure, non-arbitrary way of morally distinguishing between marginal humans and non-human animals. Hence, if the benefits of vivisection justify such painful and lethal procedures being performed on animals, so is the vivisection of marginal humans justified. This is a conclusion Frey is driven to with 'great reluctance', but which he can see no way to avoid. This paper points out a feature of the condition of marginal humans unnoticed by Frey and his critics: such humans have suffered a tragic harm. It points towards an analysis of this harm, in terms of counterfactuals holding for marginal humans but not for psychologically equivalent animals. Finally, it discusses the moral implications of the harm that such humans have suffered, and argues that it serves as the basis of a defence for preferring humans to non-humans in cases of morally inescapable conflict.