VIVISECTION AND ANESTHETICS.
[To TILE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."]
Suc,-,-Dr. Brunton and Mr. Gurney have now both replied to my letter defending my evidence given before the Commission, against the unprovoked attack made upon it by the latter. He selected one special experiment only, upon which he sought to show my evidence unreliable, on Dr, Brunton's authority. I showed that Dr. Brunton had recanted the opinions quoted by Mr. Gurney against me, in the most complete manner; and there the matter ought to have rested, unless Dr. Brunton chooses to recontradict himself, and say that the whole experi- ment can be performed either under opium or chloroform. From the opinion I had formed of Mr. Gurney's character as a gen- tleman, I should have expected him to apologise for the mistake he had fallen into regarding myself, instead of relapsing into charges of unspecified " mistakes and exaggerations," which, not being described, I cannot answer.
Dr. Brunton, on the other hand, does not, and cannot, deny that my criticism upon his remark about using curare in that -experiment was exactly apposite; and I think it regrettable that, in order to neutralise the effect of that criticism, he should have insinuated that, while making it, I was ignorant of the unequal -effect of curare upon different kinds of nerves. Even bad this been true, it would have had no bearing upon the justness of
my criticism ; but, as a matter of fact, it is the reverse of true, and had he read my evidence before the Commission (4,157 to 4,161), he would have observed that I gave positive information on this very question. Indeed, I appear to have been the only one of the numerous physiologists questioned about curare who did, or who apparently could, enlighten the Commission upon this special feature in the action of the poison. While making that insinuation, Dr. Brunton has, however, allowed himself to be drawn into another error regarding the action of curare on the chorda tympani. He surely knows that salivation is one of the first prominent symptoms of cnrarisation, due to excitation p. 231.) Dr. Brunton is, however, in error in supposing that, apart from that experiment, I endeavoured to prove the truth of my general statements made about anaesthetics, in the Spectator, from his evidence before the Commission. Upon the one point, relative to the liability of some of the lower animals to die under -chloroform, and upon which, by the way, Dr. Brunton gravely misstates my published opinions, I have already proved the truth of my assertions in my letter to the Spectator, dated June 12th, 1876, and therefore I need not repeat my proof. Strange to say, Dr. Brunton now states that Schiff and Bernard -contradict my ideas about anmsthetics, and as references in point, he actually gives the very ones I adduced in that letter, in blest unconsciousness that I had already used them in sup- port of my views, thereby showing that he has not read the letters which he criticises, but is content to take his arguments second-hand from an anonymous writer, who opposed my views in the British Medical Journal. I believe that it is considered unwarrantable to wander into points foreign to the first ques- tion at issue ; but if space could be granted to me, I am pre- pared to prove all the rest of my statements regarding amesthetics and vivisection which appeared in the Spectator from Dr. Branton's evidence before the Commission, to show that we are quite in accord upon the facts, although we may -deduce very opposite arguments from. them, for or against -vivisection. As for Mr. Gurney, I have already destroyed his pseudo- scientific phrases and arguments so completely, that there is really nothing farther left to explain which your readers could .not do for themselves, on reading his last letter.—I am, Sir, &c., Gsoaaz HOGGAN, M.B.
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