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Darwin Correspondence Project

From A. H. Payne   5 December 1879

A. H. Payne Leipzig Leipzig

Dec. 5th. 1879.

Sir,

As you are perhaps aware there is considerable agitation going on in Germany & especially here for the suppression of Vivisection, and as Leipzig has a University of 3,000 students opinions are very divided & violent.1 The Vivisectionists say that no one but a medical man can judge of the question at all, that all medical men of any name are of opinion that Vivisection is desirable & that science has profited greatly by it & that every one who asserts the contrary is a blockhead. Anti Vivisectionists on the contrary assert that medical science has gained next to nothing by it, that opinions among medical men are very divided & that notably you, Sir. W. Fergusson & many other eminent men have declared themselves decidedly against Vivisection.2 Not being a medical man myself I will not give my opinion, but I am very certain that the disgusting cruelties practised by such men as Prof. Goltz & Prof. Schiff who on their own assertions (printed) bore holes in Dogs’ heads, take out their brains & keep them in this state for months, without even attempting to prove that anything has been gained thereby,—that such proceedings are a disgrace to any nation & to man generally & I wish to assist as much as I can in stopping it.3 It would very materially assist the, as I think, good cause, if you would give your opinion on the question which I should have printed here & circulated. I hope you will excuse my troubling you with this matter, but if, as is asserted you have said “die Vivisection ist der Abscheu’s inne Verdammung merkt”4 I venture to hope that you will be glad to assist in stopping the practice.

Your’s obedt. servant, | Albert Payne

my address is

Albert Payne

c/o A. H. Payne, Publisher

Leipzig.

Ch. Darwin, Esque

P.S. To prevent the possibility of my intentions being misunderstood I would mention that I have no interest in the question beyond that of common humanity. I do not publish any books on the question & my motives therefore are quite free from business considerations. I hate cruelty & I think that an educated man who practises it under pretence of assisting science (if this is the case, or, at least, very often) is more to be condemned than a butcher or carter who is very often worked up into a rage by the frequent obstinacy of the animals he has to do with.

Footnotes

On the anti-vivisection movement in Germany, see Tröhler and Maehle 1987. Opposition to vivisection in Leipzig centred on the Physiological Institute run by Carl Ludwig, who was himself vice-president of an animal protection society (Tröhler and Maehle 1987, pp. 165–6).
CD had been involved in efforts to draft a bill regulating vivisection in 1875 and 1876 (see Correspondence vol. 23, including Appendix VI, and vol. 24). William Fergusson, a surgeon, had signed Frances Power Cobbe’s petition against vivisection; CD considered Cobbe’s petition likely to damage the practice of physiology (Cobbe 1904, pp. 629, 633; Correspondence vol. 23, letter to F. P. Cobbe, [14 January 1875]).
Friedrich Ludwig Goltz worked in Strasbourg on the localisation of cerebral function in dogs; he was able to keep dogs whose cerebrums had been removed alive for up to three years (NDB). Moritz Schiff was forced to leave Florence in 1876 after a campaign against his vivisection experiments and became professor of physiology at Geneva (DSB).
‘Vivisection is horror’s damnation realised’; however, the transcription of the German is uncertain. There is no record of CD’s saying this.

Bibliography

Cobbe, Frances Power. 1904. Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by herself. Posthumous edition. London: Swan Sonnenschein.

Tröhler, Ulrich and Maehle, Andreas-Holger. 1987. Anti-vivisection in nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland: motives and methods. In Vivisection in historical perspective, edited by Nicolaas A. Rupke. London, New York, and Sydney: Croom Helm.

Summary

Asks CD to express his opinion on vivisection to help the anti-vivisection cause in Germany.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-12344
From
Albert Henry Payne
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Leipzig
Source of text
DAR 174: 32
Physical description
ALS 4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12344,” accessed on 28 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12344.xml

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