ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

‘Animal experiments can damage your health.’ This has become a major
theme of the militant campaign against animal experiments since the mid-1980s.
Reliance on animal experiments is held to be not just cruel but misleading
as a basis for human medicine – leading to therapies that are generally
useless and often dangerous. That the British public thinks otherwise is
attributed to the vested interests and misplaced priorities of the medical
research establishment, ‘a cruel deception’ according to the title of Robert
Sharpe’s widely quoted book, published in 1988.

Seen in the context of the past two decades, and the growth of increasingly
strident, sometimes violent, animal rights activity, this focus on medical
research appears as a shift in tactics. In the 1970s and 80s, campaigns
centred on ‘nonmedical’ uses of animals, such as behavioural research or
the safety testing of cosmetics. The more recent focus on medical research
moves the debate from the moral standing of animals to a dispute over the
consequences of such research for humans. In doing so, opponents are directly
challenging one of the main justifications used by defenders of animal experiments.
The recently formed Research for Health Charities Group claims that animal
research has been ‘crucial to past success’ and is ‘vital for future progress’
in medicine. This group is one of several recent responses from the biomedical
research community to the apparently new challenge from the animal rights
movement.

Yet seen in a longer historical context, the current attack on medicine
and medical research looks less novel. Concern about the morality and the
value of animal experimentation has as long a recorded history as the practice
itself, beginning in ancient Greece. In Britain, organised opposition began
in the mid-19th century and has continued ever since, albeit with markedly
fluctuating levels of support. Many modern campaigners against animal experiments
have distanced their movement from the past, on the grounds that their animal
rights position is radically different from an older animal welfare stance.
This latter position accepts that humans do have a right to use animals
for some human ends, but also have a duty to treat such animals humanely.
There are important differences between the two positions. But to assume
that these differences are reflected in a neat separation of present and
past campaigns is wrong. Opposition to animal experiments has never been
only concerned with animal welfare.

For most of the past century, the arguments against animal experimentation
have been as much concerned with its consequences for humans as with the
fate and moral standing of animals. Moreover, this concern for humans has
focused on what, for its critics at least, animal experimentation symbolises
– the rise of biomedical science to a position of authority in our society.
Science bases its claims to authority on a particular ‘materialist’ approach
to ill-health: one that searches for the causes and treatments of disease
primarily within the cells and chemical processes of the body; one that
regards human beings as, in many respects, living machines.

The previous high point of the agitation in Britain, the last quarter
of the 19th century, was a time of widespread public concern about the growing
power of doctors and about the ‘materialist’ medicine which the medicial
profession’s leaders appeared to be promoting. The Victorian campaign against
animal experiments drew some of its support and even more of its rhetorical
appeal from this wider concern. There are clear parallels with the situation
today.

Experiments using living animals were an integral part of the introduction
of the concepts and methods of the experimental natural sciences to British
medicine and medical education in the 1850s. A small group of physiologists,
influenced by developments in France and Germany, were both extending their
own experimental activities and seeking to incorporate an experimental approach
into medical education.

Their activities were controversial within medicine but even more so
outside it. In 1876, it was largely determined lobbying by the British Medical
Association, which allied itself with the scientists, that prevented the
passing of a bill that would probably have greatly curtailed experimenters’
activities. A much less restrictive measure was eventually passed – the
1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, which was to govern animal experimentation
in Britain for the next 110 years.

Far from settling the controversy, the passage of the 1876 act served
to broaden antivivisectionists’ attacks to include the medical establishment
as well as the experimenters. They attempted to link their cause with other
contemporary protest movements against doctors’ growing power: for example,
their attempts to exclude women from the profession and their breaches of
personal liberty in the name of public health, as in compulsory vaccination
against smallpox. Another example is the Contagious Diseases acts, which
legalised enforced medical inspection and detention of prostitutes in garrison
towns as a means of controlling venereal disease. At a more personal level,
the Victorian medical profession’s rising confidence and affluence, and
their new techniques for penetrating the mystery of the human body – notably
with the vaginal speculum – were changing their relationships with patients.
Such changes provoked anxiety in some quarters, perhaps particularly among
the affluent upper and middle-class women who were the mainstay of the antivivisection
movement.

Victorian antivivisectionists attributed what they saw as declining
medical morality to the demoralising and brutalising effects of exposure
to experimental physiology. Moreover, the callousness supposedly engendered
by witnessing experiments on live animals, and by the emphasis on the scientific
method, was seen to be leading medicine down a slippery slope: from a scientific,
and thus experimental, attitude to patients towards experimenting on them.
According to Frances Power Cobbe, the leading Victorian antivivisectionist
campaigner, the patient was, for the new kind of doctor, only ‘what a rock
is to a geologist, or a flower to a botanist – the much coveted subject
of his studies’.

For Cobbe and her fellow campaigners, wise and gentle physicians were
being replaced by a new generation of unprincipled medical scientists who
had respect neither for nature nor for God as the originator of moral, social
and natural order. For the environmental approach was furthering new ideas
about the causation of disease – ideas which emphasised material causes,
chemical processes within the body and germs, and discounted causal links
between moral conduct, religious faith and physical health. For many Victorians,
not just active opponents of animal experiments, the moral implications
of developments in physiology and bacteriology were as disturbing as Darwin’s
theory of evolution had been. Science was threatening to usurp religion.
The work of microbiologists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur (those
‘scientific devils’ according to Cobbe) reduced disease to a matter of chance
encounters with germs, absolving human beings from personal responsibility
for their health. Far from relieving suffering, antivivisectionists claimed,
this attitude was leading to an obsession with health and increasingly dangerous
medical intervention, undermining faith in God’s healing power or in acceptance
of God’s will, while actually increasing ill-health.

Thus, to its Victorian opponents, animal experimentation was damaging
the spiritual and physical health of the nation. At the height of the controversy
in the 1880s, the challenge to medical scientists’ empirical claims about
the practical benefits of animal research for human health was a relatively
minor aspect of the antivivisectionist argument. But by the early years
of this century, this had begun to change. As specific applications of knowledge
derived from animal-based research became more widespread in both public
health and clinical medicine, so more antivivisectionists questioned the
effectiveness of these applications and the reliability of making inferences
from animals to humans.

But boycotting the products of animal research completely was becoming
increasingly difficult for patients, and provoked professional censure of
the decreasing number of doctors actively opposed to animal experiments.
By the First World War, public support for the antivivisectionist cause
was declining, in the face of the increasing prestige of scientists and
doctors and their growing armoury of therapeutic and preventive medicines.
The alternative approaches to healing favoured by antivivisectionists –
naturopathy, homeopathy, physical medicine, spiritual healing – were increasingly
stigmatised as ‘fringe’ medicine, as ‘superstitious quackery’.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, opposition to animal experiments never
disappeared completely. Several of the national societies founded in the
Victorian campaign, notably the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
(BUAV) and the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) survived, reiterating
their critique of medical research based on animals, but having little impact
on either general public opinion or biomedical research. The relative revival
of the opposition from the mid-1960s, in both moderate and militant form,
may be attributed to many factors, including perhaps a changing sensibility
towards animals in what is now a highly urbanised society. But its markedly
growing visibility since 1975 has coincided with what Colin Dollery of the
Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London has described as ‘the end of
an age of optimism’ about medicine.

Since the mid-1970s, the effectiveness of medical practice and research
has been increasingly subject to external and internal scrutiny. Governments
throughout the Western world have sought to contain the apparently inexorably
rising costs of health care and medical research through calls for more
value for money. In Britain at least, such calls have been accompanied by
the resurgence (under the name of Thatcherism) of a political ideology
hostile to professional power – to what Victorian critics of medicine called
its ‘middle-class trade unionism’. Decreasing public deference to professional
expertise has led to a rise in patients seeking redress when things go wrong.
Critical consumer groups have proliferated. The mass media have heightened
public awareness of the potential modern medicines have for harm as well
as benefit and of the moral issues posed by new technologies, such as prenatal
screening. ‘Alternative’ medicines have, to some extent, come in from the
fringe. AIDS has reawakened the spectre of the mass epidemic.

None of this amounts to a wholesale shift in public opinion from blind
faith in the products of medical research to total rejection: belief and
scepticism have always coexisted. Nor is there any lessening of popular
concern with health or interest in medical progress. But, compared with
20 years ago, scepticism is certainly more often and more overtly expressed
and the pursuit of health is less automatically identified with medical
interventions.

Nor is the increased scepticism coming exclusively from lay people.
Much of the outside criticism draws directly on arguments and data produced
from within academic medical research, particularly from public health.
Growing recognition of the changing burden of ill-health in late 20th-century
Britain, with an ageing population suffering from degenerative and chronic
conditions, has prompted internal debate about priorities in health policy
and medical research and the relative achievements of therapeutic and preventive
interventions in the past and their potential for the future.

A central focus in this debate since the mid-1970s has been the work
of a historical demographer and professor of social medicine, the late Thomas
McKeown. McKeown’s research showed that much of the substantial decline
in mortality from many infectious diseases since 1800 preceded the introduction
of specific medical interventions in the form of chemotherapies or immunisations.

That much is undisputed. But the precise reasons for the decline and
the contribution of medical interventions once available remain controversial
among medical historians. McKeown used his data from the past to argue
that modern medicine should reassess its priorities and extend its responsibilities.
The balance of effort should shift towards greater emphasis on external
influences and the impact of an individual’s behaviour on their ill-health
and away from internal intervention in the body’s working. He argued that
historically such internal intervention on the prevention and postponement
of death and treatment of nonfatal diseases was less significant than was
commonly supposed, but still far from negligible. McKeown by no means rejected
the contribution of animal experiments to medical knowledge. Such a position
was not unique but it was McKeown’s formulation of the thesis that attracted
widespread attention. Since then, McKeown’s name has been used to support
numerous criticisms of the biomedical model, from those on the political
left, arguing for a drastic shift towards social engineering, and those
on the right, who put greater emphasis on individual responsibility for
health.

As in the late 19th century, these concurrent social concerns about
modern medicine and the internal, professional debates about medical priorities
have provided contemporary militant opponents of animal experiments with
a new rhetoric for mobilising support – or, rather, with a revised version
of an old rhetoric. Its revival since 1986 owes much to the need for the
militant national antivivisection groups to find new means of mobilising
support after the passage of the new legislation controlling animal experiments
– legislation condemned by militant groups as a ‘vivisector’s charter’.
To get mass support, such means need to be untainted by association with
the more violent forms of animal rights protest. In turning more to arguments
about medical research, those militant animal rights campaigners who took
over the long-established national societies in the 1980s have returned,
knowingly or not, to their societies’ roots. Compared with their Victorian
predecessors, the claims of modern antivivisectionists tend to be couched
in the secular language of science rather than in religious imagery. But
moral concerns underlie much of the scientific argument. And much of the
attack is overtly directed at the moral, and hence medical, dangers of animal
experiments.

DOCTORS TAUGHT TO BURN AND POISON?

The Victorian idea of exposure to animal experiments as desensitising
and corrupting is reiterated in the attacks on demonstrations and dissection
using animals. For medical students, this is said to lead to an aggressively
interventionist approach to patient care, the ‘cut, burn, poison’ approach,
according to the BUAV’s campaigning pamphlet Health with Humanity. The pamphlet
argues that socialisation and professional vested interests produce doctors
who use people as ‘guinea pigs’, blinding them to gentler alternatives in
both therapy and research. From here it is a short step to condemning the
institutions of medicine and medical research as motivated by self-interest
and profit seeking, rather than humanitarian considerations.

In defence of animals, the new antivivisectionists have vigorously reasserted
the idea of a link between human conduct and ill-health. To make animals
suffer as a result of human failings or folly is especially reprehensible.
They argue that animal research is irrelevant and immoral by using epidemiological
research which shows that social and behavioural factors can account for
a significant amount of the variation in death from some cancers and heart
disease. The call is for a reorientation of research effort and resources
towards prevention – prevention being identified with either health education
or social engineering, not microbiology or toxicology.

This moral case for redirecting effort towards prevention is now supplemented
by claims about the ineffectiveness of animal-based medical research in
the past. There is great emphasis on exposing the ‘facts’ about medical
history, allegedly hidden from a duped public. Many of these ‘facts’ are
derived from the academic debates on public health from the 1970s. McKeown’s
most accessible book, The Role of Medicine, first published in 1976 and
now recommended reading for every medical student, is much quoted. To this
is added a catalogue of drugs withdrawn from sale after unwanted side effects
have come to light and a pessimistic picture of increasing ill-health and
death resulting from modern life. To the new ‘epidemics’ of heart disease
and cancer experienced by an ageing population (itself the product of the
decline in infectious diseases) we now have to add the modern epidemic of
iatrogenesis, medically induced ill-health.

Blame for the failures of modern medicine is attributed to reliance
on animal models. These critics deny that they are against well-founded
medical research. What is needed, according to the NAVS, is ‘real science
– the study of human beings and disease’. In tones reminiscent of Frances
Power Cobbe, careful clinical observations by patient physicians are called
for, along with more use of epidemiology and trials using human volunteers.
‘Animal experiments tell us about animals and not about people’ declares
the cover of Health with Humanity, the text being superimposed on a photographic
montage that is part cat, part human. The visual image asserts the links
between human and nonhuman animals, but the text inside denies close biological
kinship.

Indeed, as in the Victorian period, scientific developments that threaten
to blur the species barrier have aroused particular anxiety. Chimeras and
medically created monsters have long been the stuff of science fiction horror
stories, many of them directly inspired by antivivisectionist sentiment,
from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau to Stephen Gallagher’s recently
televised Chimera. These are all variants on the Frankenstein theme of the
consequences of uncontrolled scientific power. But some of the same anxieties
recur in the real-life opposition to organ transplants using animal donors
and to the creation of transgenic animals. Such breaches of social and
natural order invoke powerful images of pollution and taboo, not just among
active antivivisectionists.

Nowhere is the blend of moral and empirical arguments against animal
research more apparent than in the long-standing critique of vaccines. In
the late 19th century, the attack focused on Pasteur’s rabies vaccination.
In the late 20th century, among the targets have been vaccines against polio,
whooping cough and, most recently, the search for a vaccine against HIV
infection. Historically, the development, production and testing of most
vaccines has involved animal experiments at some stage. Antivivisectionist
opposition to them has not diminished as production and assay techniques
that do not use animals have been introduced in some cases. (The introduction
of such techniques is claimed to have been delayed by conservative researchers,
desensitised to animal suffering.) It is the approach itself that is seen
to be at fault.

Vaccines and the like are, so antivivisectionists have argued, generally
ineffective and sometimes dangerous in practice. They are also represented
as pollutants, involving the introduction of foreign bodies, deactivated
pathogens, and, often, animal-derived tissues, into the human body. Inherent
in their mode of action (if they do work) is the amoral principle of materialist
medicine. Manipulating the internal working of the immune mechanism with
an injection absolves humans from responsibility for their own conduct.

Thus both in the 19th century and now, the antivivisectionist movement
has drawn on and elaborated contemporary anxieties about and uncertainties
within medicine and medical research. In doing so, it reveals the double-edged
character of medicine, its capacity to help and to harm, its promise and
its limitations. This suggests that the current controversy over the value
of animal experiments for human health is not likely to be settled by reference
to ‘the facts’ alone.

Mary Ann Elston lectures in sociology at Royal Holloway and Bedford
New College, University of London. This article is based on research carried
out under the Science Policy Study Group/Economic and Social Research Council
programme ‘The Changing Culture of Research’ and funded by the ESRC.