"
"Oh, these fellows see nothing reprehensible in their work," said
Leigh, "And such things go on among them as make the strongest man
sick to think of! I know of two cases now in a hospital; the
patients are incurable, but the surgeons have given them hope of
recovery through an 'operation' which, however, in their cases, will
be no 'operation' at all, but simply vivisection. The poor creatures
have to die anyhow, it is true, but death might come to them less
terribly,--the surgeons, however, will 'operate', and kill them a
little more quickly, in order to grasp certain unknown
technicalities of their disease."
Angela looked at him with wide-open eyes of pain and amazement.
"Horrible!" she murmured, "Absolutely horrible! Can nothing be done
to interfere with, or to stop such cruelty?"
"Nothing, I fear," said Leigh, "I have been abroad some time,
studying various 'phases', of its so-called intellectual and
scientific life, and have found many of these phases nothing but an
output of masked barbarity. The savages of Thibet are more pitiful
than the French or Italian vivisectionist,--and the horrors that go
on in the laboratories would not be believed if they were told.
Would not be believed! They would be flatly denied, even by the men
who are engaged in them! And were I to write a plain statement of
what I know to be true, and send it to an English journal, it would
not be put in, not even in support of the Anti-Vivisection Society,
lest it might 'offend' the foreign schools of surgery, and also
perhaps lest English schools might prove not altogether free from
similar crimes.
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