7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating reading, November 1, 2004
This review is from: Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science) (Paperback)
Written for a general audience with no science training, Anita Guerrini's Experimenting with Humans and Animals is a fascinating read. It's a well-written and thoroughly readable primer on some of the important scientific advances of Western science and medicine, and the role of experiments on humans and animals, over the past centuries. Guerrini is a professional historian who has also chaired her campus' Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
The book spans 2,284 years and both human and animal experimentation in just 160 pages. Guerrini talks not just about the ethics of using animal and human subjects, but also how scientific reasoning and knowledge have evolved over the years; it's a lot of ground to cover. Further, she tries to write of past events in light of then-current moral standards and then-current scientific knowledge.
Guerrini's strategy is to highlight a few exemplary case studies and then examine them in detail. Starting with Herophilus' permission from the king of Alexandria to dissect a living human criminal, she discusses the ancients' scientific debates about the value of post-mortem dissection versus living vivisection, and of the value of comparative (i.e. animal-based) work. She gives an in-depth review of Descartes and his influence, and of the 19th century tensions between the English (mostly opposed to animal experimentation) and the French physiologists (Magendie, Bernard) developing an animal-based research methodology.
Guerrini's discussions of immunology and vaccine development are particularly fascinating. She discusses both the early days of smallpox, rabies and diphtheria immunizations, before much of current immunology was known, and devotes a chapter to the development of polio vaccines. What makes these sections so interesting is the constant interplay between research on human subjects and on animal subjects, both in terms of ethics and also in terms of interpreting study results.
I found the Conclusion vexing, maybe because the rest of the book set such high standards. Guerrini's concession to brevity and readability leaves her book and its claims less than fully referenced, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a fifteen-page final chapter that ranges through Nazi abuses, the Tuskegee syphilis studies, the development of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees and human Institutional Review Boards, the rise of animal ethics and animal liberation philosophies, sheep cloning and more. It's too rushed a treatment of the past 50 years of history; the "Silvers Springs Monkeys" are not even there. The Animal Welfare Act and the NIH's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, share but a half-paragraph together. There are claims that committees are often rubber stamps and that committee members complain about unclear rules and poorly written protocols - these charges should be better documented. That said, Professor Guerrini's inside knowledge as chair (and non-scientist participant-observer) of her campus' animal committee gives her some solid footing on which to make these claims.
I heartily recommend Experimenting with Humans and Animals for a compelling account of what our predecessors thought about the applicability of human ethics to animals, and of animal information to humans, and of the interplay between knowledge, healing, responsibility and freedom of inquiry.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Vivisectionist Apology, February 9, 2004
This review is from: Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science) (Paperback)
Experimenting with Humans and Animals will appeal to a couple of different audiences. Instructors wanting a basic brief overview of its subject matter may find it useful. Experimenting will be of interest to observers of the animal rights debate and the discussion specific to vivisection. The text is not without bias or error, but I found it of interest.
The author teaches a university class on the book's topic and is a past Chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara's animal care and use committee. Such committees are required by law; their purpose is to assure that research at their institution complies with federal regulation. Only a handful of proponents from within the industry have written overviews of the history of vivisection or defenses of the practice.
If read fairly and carefully the message of the book seems to be: We suck. Guerrinni begins with the assertion: "My argument is that the values of science are the values of the society it inhabits." She then recounts instances of animal and human experimentation over the past 2300 years. We learn that rarely has there been a time when someone wasn't cutting up some hapless dog or experimenting on a retarded orphan. Over time, the number of victims has skyrocketed. A few people have spoken up about this cruelty on occasion, but society has consistently swept their concerns aside. The text makes it clear (perhaps unintentionally) that societal values in this area are essentially unchanged today from what they have always been.
Experimenting is filled with tension. Guerrinni acknowledges that vivisection has caused much pain, but urges us to see vivisectors as actors embedded in unique periods of time with moral values appropriate to those times. For instance, she writes: "Galen [c.a. 200 C.E.] had little concern for the animals, and by our standards, he was very cruel."(p 18) This is a common theme through out the text. Unfortunately, for those who want to believe that our sensibilities have advanced, the author makes similar claims for nearly every instance of harm she cites. Writing about Harlow's experiments on baby monkeys more than 1700 years later, she says, Harlow's "colleagues and students at the time - whatever they may have felt later - did not protest." (p 133) She notes that that in the mid 1960s the Journal of the American Medical Association was uninterested in a Harvard professor's investigation into violations by American doctors of the Nuremburg standards (p 139). She concludes her long list of abuses with Ellen Roche's death as a result of an experiment at Johns Hopkins. Everyone involved, knowing the details of the risks, blamed someone else after the fact.
The author acknowledges the suffering that vivisectors have caused, but describes them as heroes. Those who dissect and vivisect are courageous and strong. She writes of the sensibilities of Aristotle's time regarding animals' bodies:
"The act of cutting, and the look, smell, and feel of the internal parts of the body, all were distasteful, and few people were willing to attempt this practice. Dissection, then and now, is also a difficult skill to master, requiring patience, a strong stomach, and manual dexterity." (p. 10)
But in Aristotle's day, around 350 B.C.E., butchering animals must have been part and parcel of everyday life. Guerrinni's obvious desire to see as heroes those who hurt others in the name of curiosity leads her to repeat claims made by previous defenders of the practice. Her evaluation of Galen's and Harvey's contributions to medicine is reverent and traditional. The recounting makes it pretty clear that justifications of modern biomedical research on animals are grounded on ethics developed nearly 2000 years ago, championed by a man in 1600. She says, "Without Galen, Harvey could not have made his discoveries," (p 13) and a few pages later that Harvey's discovery of circulation was the "most important event in the history of medicine." (p 22) Even here we find tension when she notes later that: "In his 1875 defense of animal experimentation, the American physiologist, John Call Dalton could point to increased knowledge of physiology but few practical medical advances." (p 92) Apparently Harvey's "most important" discovery had yet to pay off.
Experimenting with Humans and Animals has a few factual errors that readers might overlook. The author seems confused about Barbary apes and refers to them repeatedly as apes rather than monkeys. (pp 14-18 passim) Macaca sylvanus is the only non-human primate species in Europe (Gibraltar). She mistakenly states that the fungi are plants and that bacteria are animals. (p 93)
Her claims are at times inconsistent. For instance, she questions the antivivisectionist criticisms of Rene Descartes's philosophical claims regarding animals' sensitivities. She feels that such attention is undeserved and says that Descartes believed that animals feel "emotions such as fear and joy." (p 36) The author then acknowledges that Descartes viewed animals as incapable of suffering, but also claims that his contemporaries did not accept his views. Whether they did or not, she acknowledges his influence by noting that almost all researchers of the second half of the seventeenth century began their research based on the Cartesian concept of the "beast-machine."
The text could have presented a fairer look at vivisection today. Fairly graphic descriptions are provided for procedures undertaken centuries, or even millennia ago, but other than her descriptions of Harlow's work in the 1950s, there is little information on current practices. This omission reinforces the false claim that things have been getting better - in spite of the massive increase in the numbers of animals consumed.
I was repeatedly struck by the tension as I mentioned above. I wondered whether this was due to some need to see the vivisectors as heroes in order to justify the author's personal role in the modern vivisection endeavor. Perceiving herself as part of some societal reform effort might be a way to protect herself from the realities of the labs. In this regard, Experimenting with Humans and Animals is an interesting psychological case study.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommend it, January 17, 2005
This review is from: Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science) (Paperback)
Our library ordered this book and I read it over the Christmas break. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in research in general or the advancement of science. It is difficult to imagine a world were pain was pervasive and death all around us. Animals were not our companions, but were used by us humans. Of course there are examples, like Bucefalo - Alexander the Great's horse - of animals that were loved and treated with respect and dignity, but then again, at that time another human being - a slave - could mean nothing. I don't think the author makes a case for vivisectionism, but explains very well the historical circumstances of every epoch. For me, personally, the question is: will I be willing to inflict such pain and horror or be an accomplice, albeit silent, in order to learn how the body works? How could you find out that nerves that originate from the spinal cord are responsible for sending signals to the leg by observing a cadaver? It cannot be done unless the subject is kept alive, the damage done and then the result is observed. Imagine doing that before anesthesia was discovered/invented! Those are the kinds of things you will find in this book. It is disturbing, but it makes you think and question your own position regarding animal and human experimentation, consent, etc. It is easier to say now that we don't want to do what the people described in the book did, but the reality is that we know what we know because they came before us. Is the price for certain knowledge too high? Do we know enough already, so that if the only way to learn about certain processes is by horrible experimentation, we'd rather not learn? (Think brain processing, for example) Those are the kinds of questions that might pop up if you read this book. In addition, it has very nice figures and old diagrams, though the print in some of them was too small.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
