‘Old anatomy’ versus new physiology in the practice of vivisection

Using Amariah Brigham’s contemporary list (1840), Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna explored the methods used by nineteenth-century medical scientists to uncover the hidden workings of the nervous system: gross anatomy (human); experiment (vivisection); comparative anatomy (exploring the structural analogies and homologies between different species, including humans); developmental anatomy (especially embryology); anatomical-pathology (clinical observation followed by post-mortem); and finally, microscopy.Footnote ¹⁵ Although some of these were uncontroversial, both gross anatomy and vivisection, two of Bell’s four methods, caused considerable unease. Much has been written about anatomy’s collision with wider cultural beliefs about the body and soul.Footnote ¹⁶ Less has been said about vivisection, at least with regard to the first half of the nineteenth century; but what has been said depicts a controversial practice raising popular anxieties at a time when cruelty towards animals was being challenged by reformers inside and outside of medicine.Footnote ¹⁷

The concerns about vivisection expressed by anti-cruelty campaigners led to strategies designed to mitigate the suffering caused by vivisection, albeit by causing death. As we will see, the physician and physiologist A.P. Wilson Philip was especially attuned to long-standing concerns with vivisection, while actively promoting solutions.Footnote ¹⁸ The focus of this section, however, is on the relationship between experimentation and the disciplines of medicine as far as it shaped Bell’s experiments. Cunningham’s work is particularly useful for mapping out the connections between vivisection and disciplinarity in medicine. He rebuts the received historiographic view that to conduct vivisection was to be a physiologist. This, he argues, is an anachronism: the collapse of vivisection into physiology is an artefact of experimental physiologists’ desire to bolster their emergent and, as yet, unstable identity. But, for most of the long eighteenth century, vivisection was integral to anatomy, not physiology. Eighteenth-century physiology was a rational pursuit, more akin to scholasticism than experimentalism. The ‘old physiology’, as Cunningham branded it, focused on ‘why’ questions – explaining the body’s functions by imposing the physical or chemical theories of the day upon the ‘what’ and ‘where’ questions that had been answered by anatomy. Anatomists answered the ‘what’ and ‘where’ questions using anatomical dissection to deduce function, followed by vivisection for testing those deductions.Footnote ¹⁹

During the post-revolutionary period in France, experimental physiology overturned the old speculative and physician-based physiology, making vivisection the primary method for functional discovery.Footnote ²⁰ By systematically interrogating live animal bodies, it usurped anatomy’s position as arbiter of structure and function. It incrementally explored the body through the oft-repeated and always localised obliteration of individual parts until the specific function under exploration had been isolated and identified. According to Cunningham, Bell’s competitor Magendie was the father to the new discipline, although Lesch suggests that its birth was more complicated, giving a critical role to the emergence of the anatomical-pathological method as an immediate precursor.Footnote ²¹

In the British context, historiography has emphasised the rarity of vivisection, while also arguing that experimental physiology barely took hold before the 1870s – a portrait that remains largely unquestioned and perhaps overly influenced by the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes (1875) and its aftermath.Footnote ²² Indeed, beyond Cunningham, the knotty relationship between vivisection and the disciplines of medicine is largely unexplored, while the early history of British experimental physiology is often reduced to the lonely and heroic figure of Marshall Hall. Thus, most historians have struggled to identify the disciplinary commitments of practitioners of vivisection and the relationship it had to ‘old anatomy’ and ‘old physiology’. Geison, for example, includes Bell in a short list of English-based, Scottish-educated physiologists illustrating the influence of Scottish medical education on British physiology; the underlying assumption being that to practise vivisection was to be a physiologist.Footnote ²³ As I will show, while both Bell and the new experimental physiologists used vivisection, there was a gulf between the underlying logic of their experiments and the actual experimental practices themselves. I will now illustrate this point by comparing Bell with Wilson Philip.

Wilson Philip had been an experimentalist from his earliest days as a physician at Worcester. He had published in areas typical of a late Georgian physician, including an analysis of Malvern’s mineral waters,Footnote ²⁴ but had also shown an interest in experimentalism when studying the nature of fevers and their treatments.Footnote ²⁵ Later, he would investigate the relationship between the nervous system and digestion.Footnote ²⁶ His most significant work was on the connection between the nerves and the heart. Commencing his experiments on this subject around the same time Bell was investigating the connections between the brain and nervous system, which would result in his privately printed pamphlet Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain (1811),Footnote ²⁷ Wilson Philip would eventually read three papers at the Royal Society. Later, these were combined with a translation of the National Institute of France’s report on Julian Legallois’s experiments into An Experimental Inquiry into the Laws of Vital Function. Footnote ²⁸

The Experimental Inquiry, running to three editions, was the epitome of early nineteenth-century English experimental physiology. The agenda for Wilson Philip’s experiments was set by the longstanding question of whether the heart’s action was a function of properties inherent in its tissues or whether it received its power from another source (for example, the nerves or vascular system). Albrecht von Haller had argued a combination of the two: upon removal from the body, it remained active for a short period, its excitability the result of its natural irritability combined with the vital powers of the vascular system. Following a lengthy series of experiments, Legallois claimed to have overturned this view, concluding ‘that by the destruction of the whole or cervical part of the spinal marrow, the action of the heart is immediately so debilitated, that it is no longer capable of supporting the circulation’.Footnote ²⁹

Notwithstanding the National Institute’s imprimatur, Wilson Philip remained sceptical of Legallois’s findings. Initial experiments had revealed several theoretical holes, so he designed a new and rigorous set of experiments to test his point:

The rabbit was then disassembled: ‘the spinal marrow was laid bare from the occiput to the beginning of the dorsal vertebrae’, but the heart still beat strong, and continued to do so as long as artificial respiration was kept up. Next, the brain was removed, ‘so that no part of the nervous system remained above the dorsal vertebrae’. The heart continued beating as long as respiration occurred. But if respiration ceased, ‘the ventricles ceased to beat about half an hour after the removal of the brain’. Even then, renewed respiration might revive the heart’s activity.Footnote ³¹

Wilson Philip’s experiments left a trail of dead rabbits and frogs in their wake (he estimated that 130 rabbits had been destroyed, although there was no tally of frog deaths).Footnote ³² All the experiments involved snipping, cutting, the partial or wholesale destruction of brains and nerves, and the addition of poisonous substances here and there. The experiments became more complicated as each of Legallois’s conclusions was tested and then modified or repudiated. And so, the experiments went remorselessly on, with ever more complicated ways of inducing paralysis and death, while ponderously procuring knowledge. At times, the description of experiments was interrupted by lengthy discussions of the findings of other experimentalists, including those by William Clift,Footnote ³³ John Hunter’s erstwhile assistant and conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the occasional but important modification of Legallois’s experimental techniques.Footnote ³⁴

If Legallois was a ‘new physiologist’, so too Wilson Philip. He was part of a group who may or may not have identified as experimental physiologists but definitely adopted many of its practices and much of its logic. A list of English-based practitioners would include Marshall Hall as its prime representative, but also James Blundell, Samuel Broughton, James Hope, Herbert Mayo (at least until the mid-1820s), Charles Hastings, C.J.B. Williams, and Wilson Philip himself. The circle expands with the inclusion of sympathisers and supporters, individuals like William Sharpey, who taught the new science but did not practise it, or others like Benjamin Brodie, who had engaged in experimentation but had largely abandoned it in favour of teaching and service to societies and colleges.

As with French experimental physiology, the vivisections performed by Wilson Philip and other early British experimentalists aimed to describe the dynamic connections within the living body by the selective destruction of its parts. In this way, function could be isolated – observing, for example, the effects of cutting a single nerve or ablating a portion of the brain. There was a specific logic at play. The experimental physiologist started with a question, often originating in recently conducted research, that could only be answered by a minute analysis of function. As a practice, therefore, it was the embodiment of the ‘analysis:synthesis’ style of reasoning identified by James Elwick: the analytical breaking down of the body into its smallest constituent parts followed by synthesis, the development of a theory that demonstrated the co-functioning of those parts.Footnote ³⁵

Elwick identified Bell as a practitioner of ‘analysis:synthesis’ and, therefore, brought him into the orbit of experimentalists like Wilson Philip.Footnote ³⁶ However, while on the surface his techniques appeared similar to Wilson Philip’s, the underlying logic was profoundly different. For example, Wilson Philip was in dialogue with the French experimental school. The questions he asked directly derived from Legallois’s findings, and the methods he used to answer them were identical to those of the French physiologist.Footnote ³⁷ Bell, however, claimed that he was driven by deductions from his anatomical research, occasionally buttressed by pathological analogy. Time and again he reiterated this point, distancing himself from the new physiology while rejecting the entire body of knowledge produced by the French school.Footnote ³⁸ However, if we strip away the rhetoric and reconstruct Bell’s research programme, it becomes clear that it was driven by a set of a priori judgements, which shaped the conduct of the experiments themselves.

Nowhere are these issues better seen than in Bell and Shaw’s attempts to discredit the work of Magendie by insisting that he had stolen Bell’s experimental methods and findings – a significant plank of his attempts to whip up support for his priority claims. In 1824, Shaw revisited a story he had first recounted two years earlier of a trip made to Paris to promote Bell’s discoveries. The retelling was motivated by the enthusiastic reactions to Magendie’s public experiments on the facial nerves, which he had performed opposite Bell’s Great Windmill Street school in 1824. The visit would become a cause célèbre for anti-vivisectionists,Footnote ³⁹ but at the time Bell and Shaw were concerned about methodological and intellectual theft. Shaw was rankled by the crowds’ enthusiastic reaction:

He then redescribed the experiment he had conducted in front of Magendie at Alfort in 1821, implying a seamless and successful display, identical in all respects to the findings presented by Magendie in London. However, the original account revealed the extent to which Bell’s practice was fundamentally different to Wilson Philip’s and the new breed of experimental physiologists.

Shaw had visited Paris in 1821 to publicise Bell’s respiratory nervous system, particularly the role of the facial nerves in transforming the heart and lungs into a combined ‘organ of the passions’.Footnote ⁴¹ After meeting in Paris, Magendie and Shaw travelled together to the Alfort veterinary school, where Shaw performed a public experiment on the facial nerves of a horse. The performance could hardly have been described as a success. Dividing an unspecified branch of the fifth on one side of the face and the seventh (portio dura) on the other, he blundered around, hacking at the facial nerves of the poor beast, failing to produce the desired experimental result, and having to get the assistance of the audience to correct his mistakes.Footnote ⁴² Horses had neither been experimental nor anatomical subjects in Bell’s research programme; consequently, Shaw’s experiment foundered upon his ignorance of equine anatomy. We can only speculate what his audience made of this. We can be fairly certain, however, that as he probed, sliced, and botched, he provided a running commentary to the gathered host that bore witness to Bell’s divinely ordered respiratory nerves. We can be absolutely certain, however, that Bell’s experimental method made little or no impression upon the way that Magendie conducted his physiology, nor, indeed, upon the practices of any other experimental physiologist of note.

The Alfort episode illustrates the extent to which Bell’s programme was committed to ‘old anatomy’.Footnote ⁴³ Human dissection was the sine qua non, followed by the comparison of the human nervous system with animals placed upon the higher rungs of the ladder of creation. There was, Bell maintained, no need to carry out experiments on anything but a limited basis. ‘It is necessary only to trace the tubes, or to observe the symmetrical order of the nervous cords, in order to discover their uses’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, issues of practice and identity intertwined, reinforcing each other. Bell maintained the identity of the anatomist, who dissects corpses, carefully charting the course of the nerve fibres through the body, documenting their beginnings, connections, and terminations, and making preparations better to illustrate their course.

Bell placed anatomists in direct opposition to experimental physiologists, insisting that experiments had ‘never been the means of discovery’, and while a review from overseas had lauded Bell’s discoveries as a triumph for experimentation, it was nothing of the sort. His discoveries were ‘deductions from anatomy’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Those physiologists who resorted willy-nilly to vivisection misconceived ‘the just application of experiments’ to unravelling the mysteries of the nervous system. Here, he characterised brutal men as boasting ‘that they proceeded to their experiments without preparation’.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Preparation’ meant detailed attention to the minutiae of human and animal anatomy, combined with clinical observation, and it was for this reason that he loudly celebrated the British anatomical tradition of the Monros and the Hunters in contrast to French experimental physiology, which anyway relied on the work of anatomists like Bell for its experimental design while claiming it did not.Footnote ⁴⁷ But because Bell was an ‘old anatomist’, his discipline nevertheless demanded he perform vivisections. It was not enough to trace the passage of the nerves from brain to spinal cord to organ: experimentation served as the ultimate confirmation of careful anatomical study, ‘having taken all the assistance that the knowledge of the human structure and comparative anatomy afford, we are prepared to decide the matter by experiment’.Footnote ⁴⁸ More strongly, his insistence that when ‘the facts of anatomy’ are ‘strictly attended to, every experiment is decisive; and the truth comes out so clear and simple’ is the epitome of ‘old anatomy’.Footnote ⁴⁹ All of this was evident in the failed Alfort demonstration, which had singularly failed to ‘strictly’ attend to anatomy.

This was a far cry from the role vivisection played in experimental physiology. The ‘new physiologist’ experimented upon the nervous system in a systematic and symmetrical manner. Systematic meant removing one part of the brain, or dividing one nerve at a time, destroying the vital powers bit by bit. Symmetry required the physiologist not to divide, as a single step, the fifth on one side of the face and the portio dura on the other, to observe the effects of the combined operation – the procedure favoured by Bell. Usually, in the case of the facial nerves, the pair would be divided – left and right. Furthermore, the subject of the experiment would not survive unless further observations and experiments were to be conducted in the following days, even if the animal could viably live, as was the case when the facial nerves were the target. The animal in question would then be killed, followed by a post-mortem to ensure that the correct nerves had been divided and that the experiment had not been vitiated by collateral damage to nearby nerves.

The rigorous methods of emerging experimental physiology were visible in the practice of Britain’s two most prominent experimentalists – Wilson Philip and Marshall Hall. Mayo and Magendie, Bell’s two main competitors for priority, also followed these protocols. Magendie’s discovery of the motor and sensory roots of the spinal nerves was performed upon fully conscious puppies – an experiment that would have been morally inconceivable to Bell. That Magendie had at his disposal a litter meant he could perform every thinkable permutation of nerve division: dividing only the ventral or the dorsal root; then slicing both; and repeating the process across the litter until his interpretation was congruent with his observations.Footnote ⁵⁰ In exploring the facial nerves, Mayo’s experiments were thorough, dividing each of the nerves in question above the junction points where the nerves branched. He always divided the nerve in the same place on both the left and right sides. And he was thoroughly dismissive of Bell’s methods: according to Mayo, one of Bell’s experiments was inconclusive ‘because the nerve was not divided on both sides: had this point been attended to, a different result would probably have ensued’. Having described Bell’s key experiments, Mayo sardonically asked ‘the reader to decide’ whether the experiments were ‘satisfactory’ and bore ‘out his inferences’.Footnote ⁵¹

In conducting his experiments on the facial and visceral nerves, Bell maintained that experiment merely offered confirmation of what anatomy had already discovered. On one level, this demonstrates the power of identity to shape the actions of its disciples. Identity functions as both a methodological and ethical framework: not only should you conduct research in a certain way, but you must also do it that way. Disciplinary commitment demands specific behaviours that, by necessity, shape the actions of its adherents, creating different imperatives for the practice of physiological investigation. In simple terms, ‘old anatomists’ insisted on limited experimentation, while new physiologists emphasised the necessity of repetition. But because ‘old anatomists’ and new physiologists vivisected, both conflicted with an increasingly influential moral economy that insisted upon treating animals humanely. This allowed for a variety of defences, including Wilson Philip’s proto-ethical code and Bell’s rhetorical efforts to distance himself from the methodical and brutal thoroughness of experimental physiology. Most importantly, both used techniques derived from slaughterhouses that aimed to mitigate the suffering of experimental subjects. While Bell may have been a strict disciple of ‘old anatomy’, like many new physiologists he was prepared to use these techniques to reconcile cruelty with humanity.

Welcome to the slaughterhouse: vivisection in the early nineteenth century

Whether one was an ‘old’ anatomist or an experimental physiologist, the charge of cruelty remained the same, not least because it was vivisection, not a specific discipline, that was the target of reformers. As Wilson Philip confessed, he shared ‘the aversion […] which every man must feel’ to animal experimentation.Footnote ⁵² This may have been so, but the public’s aversion was of a piece with other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments, including the persistence of ostensibly cruel practices like cock- and dog-fighting in the face of a vociferous anti-cruelty movement, although movement might be too strong a word for the disparate interests that attacked the old order of animal use.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore, the increasing popularity of companion animals amongst the middling sort and the impact of sentimentalism and Romanticism more generally added to the growing sense that cruelty towards animals was morally objectionable.Footnote ⁵⁴

Medical men were not immune to these developments, which, no doubt, amplified their unease about vivisection. Most privileged other forms of investigation, particularly comparative anatomy, which was presented as an alternative to vivisection by some private school anatomists.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, even those who criticised the French experimentalists did not reject vivisection as a valid technique of medical science, a perspective that became apparent after Magendie’s 1824 London visit. The debates that followed the Parliamentary interventions of Richard ‘Humanity Dick’ Martin, where he raised the spectre of Magendie in his attempts to extend anti-cruelty legislation to cover vivisection, revealed that even those who were against Magendie’s methods were in favour of limited vivisection, particularly if it could demonstrate benefit to humanity.Footnote ⁵⁶

Some historians have characterised vivisection as a ‘Frankenstein science’,Footnote ⁵⁷ but the criticisms were, in reality, focused on the pain it caused animals (often characterised as ‘torture’) and the potential brutalisation of the vivisector. Wilson Philip attempted to counter both points, and his response was significant for the influence it would have upon Bell’s experimental programme. He proposed two specific measures. One of these related to the choice of animal – where two animals were equally suitable, the ‘one which would suffer least’ should be chosen. This will be addressed once I have investigated the other measure: making the animal insensible prior to experimentation – the ultimate method of pre-anaesthetic pain reduction designed to ward off criticisms of ‘wanton’ or excessive cruelty.Footnote ⁵⁸ The animal was brought as close to death as possible. Unfeeling and unconscious, teetering on the brink between life and death, vital functions were artificially maintained using ventilators even after the removal of the animal’s head or significant parts of its brain. In making the animal nearly dead, vivisectionists used techniques employed in the abattoir and knacker’s yard, an indication of a ‘dialogue’ between the worlds of the vivisector and that of the knacker-cum-slaughterman. Ironically, this realised the rhetoric of vivisection’s opponents, who sometimes damned the former by association with the latter.Footnote ⁵⁹

The two main slaughterhouse techniques early nineteenth-century vivisectors used for making animals insensible were poleaxing and pithing, although pithing criss-crossed the boundaries between the two domains. In Britain, stunning was the most commonly employed means of slaughterhouse killing. Here, the slaughterman struck the animal’s forehead with the thimble-end of a poleaxe. If well aimed and powerful enough, a single blow left the animal unconscious, deprived of its senses and ready for a painless exsanguination.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, in the early nineteenth century, Lord Somerville, then a prominent member of the Board of Agriculture, distressed by the inefficiency of poleaxing, travelled with a companion to Lisbon, where together they learnt the art of ‘pithing’ – using a stab to divide the spine in the neck.Footnote ⁶¹ This also appears to have been independently introduced to a Wisbech butcher by a Captain Clarkson, ‘who had seen [cattle] […] so slaughtered for the use of our fleet when at Jamaica’.Footnote ⁶²

Pithing was put forward as a humane method of slaughter that might replace the inefficient cruelty of poleaxing, which often led to multiple blows raining down upon the unfortunate animal’s forehead before the desired result was achieved.Footnote ⁶³ However, Thomas Du Gard, a physician at the Shrewsbury Infirmary, argued the contrary. Clinical evidence had led him to believe that pithing merely destroyed the sensibility below the division and did nothing to diminish the distress of the animal, just its ability to express pain. He advocated for the continuation of stunning, which at least had the merit of destroying the ‘power of feeling’. Footnote ⁶⁴ The anatomist Everard Home disagreed. His brother-in-law John Hunter’s papers described experiments made some years prior to Somerville’s Iberian sortie. Hunter, in tandem with Cruikshank, had shown that if the knife was ‘directed by the skill of the anatomist upwards into the cavity of the skull, so as to divide the medullary substance above the origin of the nerves which supply the diaphragm’, death would be instantaneous.Footnote ⁶⁵ The problem, then, was that some were dividing the spine below these nerves. Home also insisted that the experiments of Hunter and Cruikshank had made anatomists fully aware of the effects of pithing many years prior to Somerville’s innovation in butchery.Footnote ⁶⁶ We can only conjecture about the speed and extent to which the modified form of nape stab, as it became known, passed back into slaughterhouse practice, although it was approvingly discussed in The Experienced Butcher (1816). Certainly, later in the century, the poleaxe continued to be used by some and the nape stab by others.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, what this knowledge revealed to vivisectionists was that, depending upon where the stab was made, sensibility could be destroyed without killing the animal.

From what we can glean from the accounts of vivisectionists themselves, they held to Wilson Philip’s prescriptions, and they did so by poleaxing and pithing. Poleaxing was sometimes used upon the higher mammals. For example, on one of the rare occasions that Marshall Hall chose a large animal as a subject, he stunned it. ‘A horse was struck with a poll-axe [sic] over the anterior lobes of the brain. It fell instantly, as if struck with a thunder-bolt’, was his expressive, yet understated description. ‘It was convulsed and then remained motionless’, he continued. ‘It shortly began to breathe, and continued to breathe freely by the diaphragm’. At which point, he lacerated and pricked the horse to ensure that all sensibility had been destroyed.Footnote ⁶⁸

Often, but not always, whenever a vivisector referred to stunning, the deed was done with a poleaxe. In Bell’s case, the evidence points to a mixed practice of stunning and pithing. Shaw noted that Bell generally ‘contented himself with ascertaining’ the effects of nerve division ‘after the animal had been stunned’, while Caesar Hawkins, who acted as an assistant in many of the experiments, described animals ‘stunned or deadened to pain’.Footnote ⁶⁹ But whether or not this was poleaxing remains unclear. A former pupil, who was as ardent in his admiration of Bell as he was adamant about the necessity of vivisection, noted that in the vast majority of cases Bell’s experimental subjects were insensible,Footnote ⁷⁰ while the London Medical Gazette (1837) explicitly stated Bell ‘almost always’ had ‘recourse to’ dividing the spinal cord ‘just below the medulla oblongata’ – in other words a modified neck-stab, although there is only one explicit reference to its use by Bell himself.Footnote ⁷¹ The likelihood is, as Shaw implied, that animals were poleaxed before experiments were conducted on nerves below the neck.Footnote ⁷² But whatever method was used, the slaughterhouse and the anatomy theatre had come together in those of Bell’s experiments that necessitated the death of the animal. More importantly, however, Bell did not reduce his subjects to insensibility if the experiments were conducted upon the facial nerves. Here, it was crucial that the animal remained conscious so the impact upon the subject’s expression could be visually assessed.

The choice of experimental subject was an important part of the equation. This was determined by several interlocking factors, balancing the availability of subjects with the object of the investigation itself. London was teeming with animals – most working, others feral, a few for exotic display, and many companions – so unless the experimenter was determined to vivisect an exotic species, he was spoilt for choice. Rabbits were in bountiful supply on the outskirts of the city and its open heaths. Reptiles, like newts or snakes, could be found here too. Feral dogs and cats abounded. As a young man, Astley Cooper snatched ‘strays’ from the street for experimental subjects, but later paid his servant to organise a network of collectors for him.Footnote ⁷³ Even John Shaw once abducted a pointer.Footnote ⁷⁴

Foul-smelling knacker’s yards, found in the close and foetid streets of places like Sharp’s Alley (Farringdon), studded the city and were clogged with the entrails and hides of worn-out horses and donkeys – the beasts of burden that pulled the carriages and carts, or carried the heavy loads of the costermongers as they plied their street-side trades. Condemned cattle, warranted unfit for human consumption, were also found there. All were awaiting their fate: to be reduced to hide, glue, dyes, animal feed, or even sausages. The yards offered ample opportunities for the vivisector.Footnote ⁷⁵ But these charnel houses were not the only places to locate a subject. At the ‘Smithfield races’, held every Friday, costermongers and their ilk traded serviceable if ageing asses for a few shillings – a far cheaper prospect for the medical experimentalist than the cadavers purchased from the resurrection men.Footnote ⁷⁶

In making a choice of subject, the vivisectionist was faced with weighing the suffering caused by the experiment with the knowledge that might be gleaned. On the one hand, Wilson Philip insisted that given two equally useful animals, the one likely to suffer the least ought to have determined the choice. But on the other, if experiments were conducted to illustrate the workings of the human body, the animal needed to possess physiological characteristics that could be extended to humans. Here, comparative anatomy was essential, allowing the identification of homological nerves shared by humans and their animal subjects.Footnote ⁷⁷ At the same time, cultural values were always part of the equation. The moral worth of different species was organised in a hierarchy of sympathy that gave more credence to dog over rabbit pain, while the ‘sociozoologic scale’ granted greater ethical concern to the higher mammals over, say, the lowly frog.Footnote ⁷⁸ No doubt experimentalists like Wilson Philip believed they could offset moral outrage by choosing rabbits and frogs. But this was not an option for Bell, who was an ardent believer in natural theology combined with the Great Chain of Being.Footnote ⁷⁹ In his mind, the entire animal kingdom exhibited intentional and hierarchical design where the full range of emotions were granted to humans as a gift from God, who had also seen fit to invest the higher mammals with a limited but decreasing range of emotional expression as one descended the scale of nature. Because the expression of emotions was the raison d’être of his experiments, he was forced to experiment on those species that were highest on the scale of nature, meaning he was more likely to vivisect animals granted greater compassionate weight by culture than those chosen by Wilson Philip. Put simply, impassive rabbits and cold-hearted frogs would not do. Thus, there were compelling reasons for vivisecting the asses and dogs that he so loved – for only they could reveal the covert working of the respiratory nerves that were fundamental for understanding the expression of emotions.Footnote ⁸⁰

The making of a sentimental vivisector: Charles Bell and the navigation of feeling

Any reader of Alexander Shaw’s Narratives of the Discoveries of Sir Charles Bell (1839) written to quell the dissent that had arisen over Bell’s claims to priority in the spinal nerves would be baffled by the space it gave to the facial nerves. The greater of the two discoveries was undoubtedly the former, while the latter has been regarded as, at most, a footnote. And yet, a single chapter was reserved for Magendie’s misdemeanours, while the rest of the book concerned itself with Mayo, who had had the temerity to ridicule Bell’s respiratory nervous system.Footnote ⁸¹ In reality, Alexander could muster little evidence connecting Bell with experiments on the spinal nerves, because few had been reported: two for Idea and one for the respiratory nerves. The first was brief and understated (the species unidentified), while the latter was conducted on a stunned ass as an afterthought to experiments on the respiratory nervous system.Footnote ⁸² Consequently, to claim priority over the spinal nerves, Bell had to rely upon his facial nerve experiments, particularly upon his descriptions of the fifth, which resembled the anatomy of the spinal nerves. To have recognised the separate motor and sensory roots of the mandibular branch of the fifth was to have anticipated the discovery of the separate functions of the spinal roots.Footnote ⁸³

But the special pleading that was at the heart of Shaw’s Narratives masked the real, emotions-focused, catalyst for Bell’s research, epitomised by John Shaw’s 1822 description of a series of vivisections he conducted at Bell’s behest.Footnote ⁸⁴ Shaw introduced the subject with a short discussion of clinical conditions, some of which would later be labelled ‘Bell’s palsy’, often involving distortions of laughing or sneezing faces. He then sketched out the gross and comparative anatomy of the portio dura (the facial portion of the seventh nerve) and the fifth. Footnote ⁸⁵ But while the combination of anatomy and comparative anatomy led to significant deductions about the functions of these nerves, vivisections were required to confirm the results. The left facial nerve was divided ‘of the most expressive monkey’ that could be found in the Exeter Change menagerie on the Strand. The immediate effect was to destroy ‘the power of expression’ on that side. The monkey was kept alive, and for the next few weeks it was observed and occasionally goaded:

The experiment was repeated on ‘several animals’ to similar effect, including dogs. In one experiment where the portio dura on the right side of a dog’s face was divided, the subject was ‘quite well, having suffered little from the operation; [but] when he fawns, the right side of his face is completely motionless’. On threatening the animal, Shaw observed a ‘tremulous motion expressive of fear in all the muscles of the left side of the face’, while ‘the other [side] is perfectly still; he cannot even close the eyelid, and instead of winking when he expects to be struck, the eyeball itself is turned up’. The same facial characteristics were expressed when the dog was ‘fighting with another dog’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Dogs and monkeys were not alone in having their induced paralysis antagonistically tested. Shaw divided the ‘infra-orbital’ nerve of a cat.

The portio dura of a game-cock was cut: ‘on opposing to another cock, there was a marked difference in the erection of the feathers of the two sides’.Footnote ⁸⁹ And so the experiments went on. An ass had its portio dura divided on one side, and its fifth on the other.Footnote ⁹⁰ Another ass was bled until unconscious, whereupon the nerves were irritated and pinched before the animal expired.Footnote ⁹¹ An ox was exsanguinated at an abattoir where its nerves were divided, while Shaw also re-enacted an experiment on a horse’s facial nerves that he had, as we have seen, unsuccessfully attempted at the Alfort veterinary school.Footnote ⁹² These experiments were all part of Bell’s exploration of his respiratory nervous system, but the facial nerve experiments were specifically designed to stimulate the subjects’ emotions – ‘expressive’ monkeys, spitting cats, angry or fawning dogs, fighting cocks.Footnote ⁹³

The target of these experiments may have been the emotions, but their conduct placed large emotional overheads on Bell and his subordinates. While the new ‘humane’ techniques allowed deep probing of the visceral nerves connecting heart, lungs, and face, there was little that could be done to alleviate the pain of pricking or cutting the fifth; and yet, without slicing the facial nerves, he could not identify the functional substrate of emotional expression. Bell’s gratitude, for example, about the lack of pain experienced by his subjects on cutting the seventh was freighted with pathos: the ‘experiment of cutting the […] nerve […] gave so little pain, that it was several times repeated on the ass and dog, and uniformly with the same effect’; a repetition that was far less likely to be conducted on the sensory or the visceral nerves, the latter requiring slaughterhouse techniques.Footnote ⁹⁴ But even with the seventh, the animal had to be restrained, the skin cut, and the nerve divided – hardly a trauma-free experience for either animal or operator.

In conducting these ostensibly cruel experiments, Bell constantly had to steer a path between the conflicting demands of his identity as an anatomist (the experiments could not be avoided for disciplinary reasons) and his humane beliefs (harming animals was morally unjustifiable). We have already explored how ‘old anatomy’ had emotional implications, but we should also note that, rather like Boddice’s experimental physiologists, these were nested within a larger moral economy. Michael Brown suggests that this was, echoing Reddy’s terminology, the Romantic emotional regime. Furthermore, his exploration of the connections between surgical identity and practice in the pre-anaesthetic era argues that Bell, along with many of his surgical contemporaries, was a subject of this regime. The Romantic surgeon, according to Brown, far from being the brutal and dispassionate ‘sawbones’ of myth, was a man of compassion who practised his craft with a high degree of concern for his patient’s pain and suffering.Footnote ⁹⁵ Brown has suggested that Bell, himself, was moulded by his brother John into a surgeon who was ‘a man of feeling’ treating his patients with kindness and compassion.Footnote ⁹⁶ Logically, this should extend to his vivisections. His compelling argument is given further weight by Bell’s integration into Romantic culture, including his profound interest in the emotions and his innate sympathy towards his experimental subjects.

Bell’s connections to Romanticism were personal, professional, and aesthetic. His paintings and sketches depicted Romantic scenes – beggars and hawkers, castle ruins and deserted landscapes.Footnote ⁹⁷ His wife noted he had a taste for the ‘benevolent’ and the ‘picturesque’: Bell, she said, ‘could not pass an old beggar or a negro; and an Irishman in rags was rather attractive’.Footnote ⁹⁸ His desk was loaded with works of a suitably, if somewhat staid, Romantic taste: ‘Standard poets, White’s Selbourne, Walton, Scott, &c.’Footnote ⁹⁹ Earlier he bought collections of poems by William Collins, Thomas Gray, and Thomas Campbell, ‘all to cheer […] [him] up’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He consulted with Wordsworth, communicated with Walter Scott, and moved in the more refined and polite circles of Romantic poetry; both Joanna Baillie and Anne Hunter were acquaintances, the eminent ‘bluestockings’ also having familial connections with Bell’s Scottish expatriate medical network through the physician-anatomist Matthew Baillie and the surgeon-anatomist John Hunter. His integration into this network may, however, have had less to do with medicine and more to do with his old friend the solicitor John Richardson.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But he was not too refined. He could, in the right setting, appreciate the most dangerous poet of them all: ‘He had not a copy of Byron in the house, but “Childe Harold” was our guide in Italy’, said Marion.Footnote ¹⁰² Marion’s portrait of her late husband is confirmed by his published letters, where, from his earliest time in London to the days immediately prior to his death, sentiment, sensibility, and a Romantic aesthetic remained ever-present. His unpublished correspondence reveals that these were entirely representative of his worldview.Footnote ¹⁰³

Bell’s professional and cultural connections would, then, seem to confirm Brown’s thesis. Indeed, Bell found it as troubling to perform vivisections on animals as he did capital operations on patients,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and we can see in his articles and published letters the efforts he made to steer a course between disciplinary demands and his warranted moral qualms.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But his connections to Romanticism indicate just how deep-seated were his feelings about cruelty to animals. Hierarchies of sympathy founded upon sentimental moral philosophy had already created the potential for white Europeans to extend their moral concern outwards to all of humanity. Romanticism went further. David Perkins has described how this played out with many of Bell’s cultural connections. The poetry of Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, and Wordsworth frequently dwelt upon compassion to animals. Beyond this circle, Bell would have been well-versed in Robert Burns, particularly ‘To a Mouse’, which portrayed a ploughman extending his compassion to an animal usually regarded as vermin. Coleridge’s ‘To a Young Ass’, too, would have affectively chimed with Bell’s wider concerns about animal creation and his love of the much put-upon ‘cuddies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

I believe, however, that there were, contrary to Brown’s argument, two moral economies at play in Bell’s medical and scientific world. Sympathy, Brown’s major passbook for his Romantic regime, was central to eighteenth-century sentimentalism, which predated and prefigured Romanticism. This was not the hackneyed sentimentalism of literature, nor the canting sentimentality of the weeping dandy; rather, the sentimentalism of the empirical philosophers, particularly those of the Scottish Enlightenment, which forged strong connections between the nervous system and sympathy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Bell’s surgical compassion fitted nicely within a broadly sentimental moral economy, and his experimental programme reflected sentimentalism’s concerns. His moral concerns about the suffering to animals caused by his experiments were, however, fully Romantic – and it was this, above all else, that shaped and constrained his experimental programme.

Bell was born and brought up in the sentimental moral economy, which in its Scottish guise placed enormous weight on the relationship between sympathy and the nervous system. Edinburgh was a hotbed of thinking about nerves and the role they played in medicine and society.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Christopher Lawrence highlighted Edinburgh medicine’s unwavering focus on the nervous system, which ‘had come to dominate Edinburgh physiology’, while also highlighting the connections between medicine and philosophy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Medically, three stood out, each a professor at the University: Robert Whytt (1714–66); William Cullen (1710–90); and Alexander Monro Secundus (1733–1817), who taught Bell. All shared an interest in nervous physiology and pathology. All were committed to experimentation. Whytt, for example, had replaced Boerhaavian mechanism with the ‘sentient principle’, a form of vitalism that imagined the soul united with the sensory nerves that would echo some of Bell’s findings. Like many of his Edinburgh peers, he was interested in how sympathy between different organs was established by the nervous system – another foundation of Bell’s nervous discoveries.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The focus of the new nervous physiology was directly connected to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. Where Whytt explored the foundations of nervous sympathy, David Hume and Adam Smith described its social expression.Footnote ¹¹¹ The philosophy of the passions, affections, and sentiments was central to Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, whether it was propounded by sentimentalists, rationalists, or the Common Sense philosophers, who took a position halfway between the two. Bell’s ideas and investigations, therefore, neatly fused with the priorities of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, focusing upon critical issues around mind, memory, and emotions, often through the lens of a thorough-going Associationist. It was this combination of science and sentimental philosophy that drove his interest in the tight connections between the expression of emotions and the nervous system.Footnote ¹¹²

Bell’s experimental investigations were, however, directly opposed to the Romantic moral economy that shaped his attitudes to animals. However much he detested causing pain, his discipline demanded he inflict it. Indeed, there was an irreconcilable gulf between his disciplinary identity and his cultural allegiances, which produced tangible effects. We might speculate, for example, that he remained first and foremost an anatomist because of his ethical qualms – his insistence upon the brutality of new physiology an emotive attempt at allaying his conscience. As Bell’s first obituarist stated: he ‘was not of the Frenchified butcherly school of anatomical experimenters’.Footnote ¹¹³ But the strongest evidence for the effects of Bell’s rocky emotional navigation lies in his abandonment of experimentation after the death of John Shaw in 1827. Shaw was the ultimate emotional bulwark, able to undertake experiments for which Bell had no stomach. As Caesar Hawkins, sometime assistant at the Great Windmill Street school, said: ‘Sir Charles […] could not bear to witness suffering and torture, even for the sake of science, and it was not till […] Shaw, with myself or other assistants, had prepared everything for him that our chief ventured to appear and observe, and frequently not till after the animals had been stunned and deadened to pain’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Shaw’s untimely demise put a resounding full stop to Bell’s experimental programme.

The ethics of experimental physiology in the pre-Darwinian era emerged out of a similar negotiation between disciplinary identity and the sentimental moral economy. In pursuing a rigorous style of experimental physiology, Wilson Philip’s ethics were a response to increasingly vocal criticisms of humane culture. The critiques were not new – they were part and parcel of Hogarthian culture, with the longstanding belief that certain behaviours were morally corrupting. Like the profession of butchery, repeated vivisections – according to critics – hardened the operator to cruelty, vaccinating him against the sympathy that was due to the suffering subject. Wilson Philip responded by asserting his compassion, while choosing experimental subjects with less cultural cachet.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He hoped to strengthen his ethical defences by employing the slaughterhouse techniques that minimised pain. But none of this could remove the taint of ‘wanton’ cruelty, and unlike Bell, Wilson Philip’s writing was gore-soaked, even as he protested his humanity. The ethical system he proposed was driven, like Bell’s vacillations, by an acknowledgement that what he did opposed cultural norms. But this, he believed, should be offset by weighing the everyday cruelty suffered by animals (for work, sport, or food) against vivisection’s potential benefits for humanity. The only solace Bell could find was in the limited experimentation of ‘old anatomy’, but even then, his conscience would not be fully salved.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Conclusion: manliness and vivisection from sentimentalism to Darwinism

This case study of Bell’s experimental practices reveals the tensions between the anatomy theatre and the slaughterhouse. Bell’s simultaneous love for animals and dependence upon their experimental destruction created an ethical dilemma that he never fully resolved. Comparing Bell and Wilson Philip demonstrates distinct approaches to the same moral predicament. Whilst Philip developed systematic protocols to minimise animal suffering through slaughterhouse techniques and a reliance on animals set lower on the sociozoological scale, Bell’s experiments on the facial nerves required the observation of conscious subjects high on that scale to observe the relationship between the nerves and emotional expression. This rendered many of Wilson Philip’s innovations inapplicable to his most important work, forcing him to navigate between disciplinary obligations and personal ethics, shaping his navigation between scientific duty and the nested economies of sentimentalism and Romanticism.

Part of this process relied upon specific cultural understandings of how character operated as a defence against culturally abhorrent practices like vivisection. As we have seen, the arguments made in favour of the practice balanced the benefits to humanity with compassion. There was also the need to exercise constant vigilance against the moral corruption of brutal and brutalising practices. Just as in pre-anaesthetic surgery, the protection lay in the character of the operator, who had to shape an appropriate emotional response to the suffering he inflicted. This was achieved through resources provided by specific moral economies, while mobilising a particular form of manliness that guaranteed the probity of the vivisectionist as an upright moral being. In this, Bell was far more successful than Wilson Philip, who, despite the importance of his findings, has been largely forgotten. Bell could at least mobilise the persona of ‘a gentleman and a Christian’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This was, however, a fundamentally different form of manliness to that which acted as a bulwark for experimental physiologists during the 1870s, the years of its greatest controversy. The scale of nature had been replaced by Darwinian common descent, and anaesthetics had made slaughterhouse techniques redundant. The compassionate economy that had underpinned Bell’s navigation of feeling and determined Wilson Philip’s rudimentary ethics had been displaced by a Darwinian economy where ethics were underwritten by a different incarnation of character that emphasised stoicism and sang froid. Footnote ¹¹⁸