The production of medicoethical misconduct: medical ethics and vivisection in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science.

Even as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science continues in the tradition of cautionary tales of medicine and science, it also integrates nineteenth-century discussions of medical ethics, vivisection and women, further building on earlier criticisms of scientific hubris. By indicting a fictional medical doctor and his methodology, Heart and Science depicts the extremes of good and bad, ethical and unethical medicine-whether the doctor can care, and not simply solve the medical enigma-in light of a changing medical field that prized objectivity and distance from the subject over the old holistic way of listening to a patient in order to understand her malady. In reading Collins within his historical context and against a changing environment within the medical sciences, literary critics discern a gendered doctor-patient relationship and observe a Victorian author's attempts to combat the fears of scientific advancement by using or aligning himself with a proto-feminist perspective.

Science, sensitivity and the sociozoological scale: Constituting and complicating the human-animal boundary at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection and beyond.

Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders (1996) have argued that human societies index both humans and animals as belonging to particular rungs of the social hierarchy. They term this multispecies ranking the "sociozoological scale". This paper will investigate how claims at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection about the sensitivity of particular species and breeds not only reflected assumptions about human social hierarchy but also blurred the boundaries between the human and the animal in the process. It will further be shown how these claims were informed by 18th and 19th century humanitarianism, classism, scientific racism and evolutionary theory, and how these influences combined in claims-making about the relative capacity of particular animals to sense pain and ethical duties towards them that followed from this sensitivity. Particular attention will be given to the opposing efforts of commissioners Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Holt Hutton to demarcate human and animal sensitivity and exempt companion animals from vivisection respectively. The paper concludes by considering the sociozoological orders constituted by the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, particularly through its focus on calculating pain, and the legacy and limitations of this constitution.

Vivisection through the eyes of Wilkie Collins, HG Wells and John Galsworthy.

The article argues that, unlike Collins' adamantly negative view towards vivisection in the latter half of the nineteenth century and approaching the end of his writing career and life, Wells and Galsworthy's changing opinions responded to medical advances, reflected the dynamics of public opinion, and their own knowledge and experience at their time of writing. With its primary focus on Galsworthy, the study also explores the reactions of contemporary critics, readers, scientists and medical practitioners to these depictions of vivisection. Above all, the article argues that popular writers, particularly before modern multimedia, greatly influenced public attitudes towards changes in society, including medical research by vivisection. The ultimate change of heart towards vivisection by Nobel Prize winner Galsworthy, an indirect and eminent beneficiary of vivisection, the article concludes, would have boosted public acceptance and the cause of modern medicine.

The History of Anti-vivisection Legislation in Turkey and the Role of a New Association.

A new anti-vivisection association (Deneye Hayir Dernegi) was recently established in Turkey with the aim of carrying out advocacy and lobbying activities to end non-human animal use by replacing animal-based experiments with alternative scientific methods. To achieve this end-goal, the Association works hard to create awareness of animal experiments and to protect the rights of animals. Complementary to our lobbying efforts to bring about a ban on animal use, we undertake a wide range of public awareness campaigns and other activities, such as: publishing communication material; organising workshops; participating in outreach events; networking with universities to promote the adoption of alternative methods and best practice learning tools; informing the general public via social media.

Making the anaesthetised animal into a boundary object: an analysis of the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection.

This paper explores how, at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection, the anaesthetised animal was construed as a boundary object around which "cooperation without consensus" (Star, in: Esterbrook (ed) Computer supported cooperative work: cooperation or conflict? Springer, London, 1993) could form, serving the interests of both scientists and animals. Advocates of anaesthesia presented it as benevolently intervening between the scientific agent and animal patient. Such articulations of 'ethical' vivisection through anaesthesia were then mandated in the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, and thus have had significant downstream effects on the regulation of laboratory animals in Britain and beyond. Constructing this 'consensus' around the anaesthetised animal, however, required first excluding abolitionists and inhumane scientists, and secondly limiting the interests of experimental animals to the avoidance of pain through anaesthesia and euthanasia, thereby circumventing the issue of their possible interest in future life. This consensus also served to secure the interests of vivisecting scientists and to limit the influence of public opinion in the laboratory to administrative procedure and scheduled inspection. The focus on anaesthesia was connected with discussions of what supporting infrastructures were required to ensure proper ethical procedure was carried out by scientists. In contrast to the much studied polarisation in British society between pro- and antivivisectionists after 1876, we understand the 1875 Commission as a conflict amongst scientists themselves, while also being an intra-class conflict amongst the ruling class (French in Antivivisection and medical science in Victorian society, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975).

The European politics of animal experimentation: From Victorian Britain to 'Stop Vivisection'.

This paper identifies a common political struggle behind debates on the validity and permissibility of animal experimentation, through an analysis of two recent European case studies: the Italian implementation of the European Directive 2010/63/EC regulating the use of animals in science, and the recent European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) 'Stop Vivisection'. Drawing from a historical parallel with Victorian antivivisectionism, we highlight important threads in our case studies that mark the often neglected specificities of debates on animal experimentation. From the representation of the sadistic scientist in the XIX century, to his/her claimed capture by vested interests and evasion of public scrutiny in the contemporary cases, we show that animals are not simply the focus of the debate, but also a privileged locus at which much broader issues are being raised about science, its authority, accountability and potential misalignment with public interest. By highlighting this common socio-political conflict underlying public controversies around animal experimentation, our work prompts the exploration of modes of authority and argumentation that, in establishing the usefulness of animals in science, avoid reenacting the traditional divide between epistemic and political fora.

David Ferrier's Experimental Localization of Cerebral Functions and the Anti-Vivisection Debate.

While representing one of the most important developments in the knowledge of the brain, both for its theoretical advances and its medical consequences, the work of David Ferrier met with strong criticism from conservative circles in Victorian society. At the end of 19th century certain British neurologists and neurosurgeons ­ including Ferrier ­ faced vehement public attacks by those aristocrats who, under the banner of antivivisectionism and "natural theology", expressed their fears of the reorganization of medicine into a scientific discipline. The debate that developed in Victorian society after these events led not only to the diffusion of Ferrier's ideas and public recognition of the advanced neurosurgical practices that stemmed from his work, but also contributed to the affirmation of the medical community in the scientific world of the time.

Pain as Practice in Paolo Mantegazza's Science of Emotions.

Paolo Mantegazza's science of emotions represents the dominant style of thinking that was fostered by the late nineteenth-century Italian scientific community, a positivist school that believed that the dissemination of Darwin's evolutionary ideas would promote social progress in that country. Within this collective thought, Mantegazza was committed not only to studying the physiological experience of pain by means of vivisection but also to completing an anthropological study that examined the differences between the expressions of suffering in primitive and civilized cultures.Thus, the meaning of pain appears throughout Mantegazza's research as a result of applying an ensemble of scientific practices integral to observation, experimentation, and he scientific self, which enabled its main physiological and psychological manifestations to be reproduced in the laboratory. Among these practices, photography allowed Mantegazza to mobilize pain as an emotion whose performativity shaped national identities, such as those that embodied the recently created Italian state.

The Magnus-Rademaker Scientific Film Collection: Ethical Issues on Animal Experimentation (1908-1940).

The Magnus-Rademaker scientific film collection (1908-1940) deals with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were carried out with animals (e.g., labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brain stem sections) as well as observations done on patients. The films were made for demonstrations at congresses as well as educational objectives and film stills were published in their books. The purpose of the present study is to position these films and their makers within the contemporary discourse on ethical issues and animal rights in the Netherlands and the earlier international debates. Following an introduction on animal rights and antivivisection movements, we describe what Magnus and Rademaker thought about these issues. Their publications did not provide much information in this respect, probably reflecting their adherence to implicit ethical codes that did not need explicit mentioning in publications. Newspaper articles, however, revealed interesting information. Unnecessary suffering of an animal never found mercy in Magnus' opinion. The use of cinematography was expanded to the reduction of animal experimentation in student education, at least in the case of Rademaker, who in the 1930s was involved in a governmental committee for the regulation of vivisection and cooperated with the antivivisection movement. This resulted not only in a propaganda film for the movement but also in films that demonstrate physiological experiments for students with the purpose to avert repetition and to improve the teaching of experiments. We were able to identify the pertinent films in the Magnus-Rademaker film collection. The production of vivisection films with this purpose appears to have been common, as is shown in news messages in European medical journals of the period.

An arterially perfused nose-olfactory bulb preparation of the rat.

A main feature of the mammalian olfactory bulb network is the presence of various rhythmic activities, in particular, gamma, beta, and theta oscillations, with the latter coupled to the respiratory rhythm. Interactions between those oscillations as well as the spatial distribution of network activation are likely to determine olfactory coding. Here, we describe a novel semi-intact perfused nose-olfactory bulb-brain stem preparation in rats with both a preserved olfactory epithelium and brain stem, which could be particularly suitable for the study of oscillatory activity and spatial odor mapping within the olfactory bulb, in particular, in hitherto inaccessible locations. In the perfused olfactory bulb, we observed robust spontaneous oscillations, mostly in the theta range. Odor application resulted in an increase in oscillatory power in higher frequency ranges, stimulus-locked local field potentials, and excitation or inhibition of individual bulbar neurons, similar to odor responses reported from in vivo recordings. Thus our method constitutes the first viable in situ preparation of a mammalian system that uses airborne odor stimuli and preserves these characteristic features of odor processing. This preparation will allow the use of highly invasive experimental procedures and the application of techniques such as patch-clamp recording, high-resolution imaging, and optogenetics within the entire olfactory bulb.

Medical science and the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876: A re-examination of anti-vivisectionism in provincial Britain.

The Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 was an important but ambiguous piece of legislation. For researchers it stymied British science, yet ensured that vivisection could continue under certain restrictions. For anti-vivisection protestors it was positive proof of the influence of their campaigns, yet overly deferent to Britain's scientific elite. In previous accounts of the Act and the rise of anti-vivisectionism, scientific medicine central to these debates has been treated as monolithic rather than a heterogeneous mix of approaches; and this has gone hand-in-hand with the marginalizing of provincial practices, as scholarship has focused largely on the 'Golden Triangle' of London, Oxford and Cambridge. We look instead at provincial research: brain studies from Wakefield and anthrax investigations in Bradford. The former case elucidates a key role for specific medical science in informing the anti-vivisection movement, whilst the latter demonstrates how the Act affected the particular practices of provincial medical scientists. It will be seen, therefore, how provincial medical practices were both influential upon, and profoundly affected by, the growth of anti-vivisectionism and the passing of the Act. This paper emphasises how regional and varied medico-scientific practices were central to the story of the creation and impact of the Cruelty to Animals Act.

Conceptual bases in restoration of scientific vertebrate collections.

The scientific heritage preserved in Brazilian biological collections has inestimable value. Despite the research on curation and restoration of biological material is regarded as strategic, there is a lack of expertise in these areas in the country. These deficiencies often determine the use of obsolete or even inadequate procedures aimed at the recovery of material for research or exhibition, resulting in risk to valuable specimens. In the present work we provide a review of the literature on the restoration of biological specimens and summarize concepts employed in the restoration of mammals and birds of the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, exhibition in 2011. The aim of this work is to contribute to the development of protocols when interventions are needed to restore damaged specimens.

Selected anatomists: at the boundary of contemporary ethics.

Fascination with the interworkings of the human body has permeated scientific discovery for eons. Materials for dissection proved problematic for anatomists. Andreas Vesalius solved his dilemma by visiting local gallows where criminals had been executed. Eduard Pernkopf has been alleged to have taken some of his materials from victims of the Holocaust. Even today, executed criminals have served as subjects for anatomical educational purposes. These circumstances are explored and the contemporary ethics of each are compared.