At the turn of the 20th century, English physicians William Bayliss and Ernest Starling began a series of experiments on live animals. Their work would eventually lead them to discover hormones and earn Starling a Nobel Prize.
But first it would spark international outcry, a high-profile legal battle, and a series of violent riots that would pit British medical students against cops, feminists, socialists, and animal rights activists—all over the fate of one brown dog.
The Brown Dog Affair, as it was known, became a cause célèbre that forced people to face an ethical dilemma we're still grappling with today: How much animal suffering can we justify in the name of scientific progress? The fracas led to some of the world's first real regulations on animal experimentation and fueled the growth of the budding animal rights movement. But today, it's largely forgotten.
 The Brown Dog AffairFebruary 08, 2019 |
A few bad men, and one good boy
At the turn of the 20th century, English physicians William Bayliss and Ernest Starling began a series of experiments on live animals. Their work would eventually lead them to discover hormones and earn Starling a Nobel Prize.
But first it would spark international outcry, a high-profile legal battle, and a series of violent riots that would pit British medical students against cops, feminists, socialists, and animal rights activists—all over the fate of one brown dog.
The Brown Dog Affair, as it was known, became a cause célèbre that forced people to face an ethical dilemma we're still grappling with today: How much animal suffering can we justify in the name of scientific progress? The fracas led to some of the world's first real regulations on animal experimentation and fueled the growth of the budding animal rights movement. But today, it's largely forgotten.
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Anatomy's gory glory days
For most of its history, Western medicine has been rooted in vivisection, the practice of dissecting and experimenting on live animals. Ancient Greek thinkers and physicians from Aristotle to Herophilus—dubbed the "father of anatomy"—used live animal experiments as a basis for their knowledge of the body. In fact, Herophilus and his student Erasistratus are said to have gone a step further and vivisected human convicts.
Influenced by his Greek forebearers, Roman physician Galen of Pergamon practiced vivisection extensively before penning authoritative treatises on medicine in the 2nd century that stood unchallenged until the Renaissance. Galen's erroneous ideas about the body only began to be overturned when Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius made vivisection fashionable again—setting off a new wave of animal experimentation and anatomical discoveries.
The anatomists' grisly work led to some genuine breakthroughs. English physiologist William Harvey, for example, became the first European to accurately describe the circulatory system after using live animals to test his theories about blood flow. (For what it's worth, Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis beat him to the punch by about 300 years—and the Chinese had apparently figured out blood circulation 16 centuries earlier.)
But in the meantime, popular opposition to vivisection grew. In 1875, Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS), the first advocacy group dedicated to ending animal experiments. It successfully advocated for the world's first law regulating animal experimentation, the 1876 "Cruelty to Animals Act"—a toothless measure NAVS derided as "infamous but well-named."
Against this backdrop, Bayliss and Starling began their work.
"The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."
—French physiologist and vivisectionist Claude Bernard, acknowledging the unpleasantness of his methods
The brown dog done to death
On Feb. 2, 1903, Starling and Bayliss gave a lecture on the digestive system to a theater full of medical students—and two spies. Their names were Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau, and they were committed feminists and anti-vivisectionists. They had traveled from Sweden to enroll at the London School of Medicine for Women, attend lectures around town, and document the practice of vivisection in British universities.
That day, they witnessed an outrage. During the lecture, a brown terrier was wheeled out, strapped to a board. Starling had already performed one experiment on the dog two months earlier, shutting off its pancreas. This time, Bayliss cut open the dog's neck and spent half an hour unsuccessfully trying to stimulate the animal's salivary glands with electrodes. Eventually, he gave up and handed the dog over to a student (Henry Dale, another future Nobel laureate) who stabbed it through the heart, thus ending the lesson.
Later, the Swedes would testify that the dog had not been anesthetized during the procedure and repeatedly struggled to escape. But what had galled them most was the laughter they heard in the room throughout the procedure.
After Claude Bernard vivisected the family dog, his wife and daughters left him and became anti-vivisection campaigners.
"Hysterical" women v. men of science
In April, Hageby and Schartau shared an unpublished manuscript of their account with Stephen Coleridge, a prominent barrister and secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. A month later, Coleridge gave a fiery speech about the brown dog incident at the annual meeting of the NAVS in front of about 2,000 people. The next day, newspapers published excerpts from the speech and members of Parliament soon started crying foul in the House of Commons.
Bayliss sued for libel. At trial, Starling got on the witness stand and admitted that they had broken the very lax rules of the Cruelty to Animals Act by performing multiple experiments on the same animal. But Bayliss insisted that they had drugged the dog, and that if the Swedish students saw the dog move it was because it had an involuntary twitch.
More than anything, Bayliss's lawyer excoriated Coleridge for believing the women without evidence, and for making public statements about them without first talking to Bayliss in private, man to man. After four days of testimony, the judge called the women's account "hysterical" while giving instructions to the jury. The jurors conferred for 20 minutes, then found Coleridge guilty of libel. The judge ordered Coleridge to pay Bayliss £2,000 in damages. Bayliss donated the money to the University College London physiology department, to fund animal research.
Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with The Brown Dog Affair?
In December 1903, Mark Twain—who opposed vivisection—wrote a short story called "A Dog's Tale," told from the perspective of a dog whose puppy is experimented on and killed. According to his biographer, it was likely inspired by the Coleridge libel trial.
Resistance, riots, and really mean doctors
In 1906, three years after the trial, anti-vivisectionists pooled money to build a bronze statue of the brown dog in Battersea, London. Its inscription read, in part: "In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College… Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?"
Medical students, particularly those at University College, were outraged. Summing up the reactions of most of the day's medical men, the New York Times described the inscription as the "hysterical language customary with anti-vivisectionists" and "a slander on the whole medical profession."
By 1907, mobs of "anti-doggers" made regular attempts to vandalize or demolish the statue, only to be rebuffed by a round-the-clock police guard. Meanwhile, other medical students broke up women's suffrage meetings (many anti-vivisectionists were suffragettes) by smashing tables, breaking chairs, and fighting women.
In one particularly dramatic incident, a group of 1,000 medical students carrying brown dog effigies converged on Trafalgar Square to protest the statue. There they met 400 police officers, including 15 on horseback. Cops and students brawled for hours, with mounted police repeatedly charging the crowd to separate the students and arrest the stragglers.
As the brown dog became a symbol of resistance against the male-dominated medical establishment, an eclectic group of progressives descended on Battersea to defend the statue, including trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, and feminists. Eventually the statue fell—not to the medical students, but to a newly-elected conservative council that had grown tired of the cost and hassle of defending the brown dog. Under cover of darkness on the morning of March 10, 1910, four municipal workers, escorted by 120 cops, did the dog in.
The tortured road to testosterone
An eccentric scientist explains the history of animal experiments that led to the discovery of testosterone—including Starling's infamous vivisections—using rubber ducks and a ceramic bull with a set of edible model testicles.
300: Number of animal experiments in the UK in 1875, the year when NAVS founded
19,084: Number of animal experiments in the UK in 1903, including the vivisection of the brown dog
3,497,335: Animal experiments in the UK in 1984, when animal rights activists commissioned a new brown dog statue to replace the old one
100 million+: Estimated number of animals currently killed in experiments worldwide each year, according to PETA
Poll Should we experiment on live animals? |
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