Letter of the Day: June 8 - Vivisection?

Curatorial Records: Numbered Correspondence 1523

 

609 Third St.,

Washington, D.C.,

June 8, 1896.

 

Surgeon Walter Reed, U.S.A.,

Curator Army Medical Museum,

Washington, D.C.

 

Dear Sir:

 

In reply to your letter of June 5, 1896, enclosing an extract from the Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on the subject of vivisection, I would say that a very wonderfully distorted, inaccurate and false description has been given of work conducted at the Army Medical Museum some twenty years ago. Those who were practically engaged in the Microscopical Division should know better than any one else the character of the work that was performed, and that all animals experimented upon were under the influence of an anesthetic. One who was not in any manner connected with the Microscopical Division of the Museum, as was the case with Dr. L.E. Rauterberg, could draw upon his imagination very satisfactorily, and write a vivid description of what might have been done with animals, the remains of which he saw under alcohol in specimen jars. I, however, testify that at no time during my connection with the Army Medical Museum, from about 1870 to the end of the year 1895 have any experiments been performed upon animals in which an anesthetic was not used, unless some of the ordinary inoculation experiments, which are practically painless, nor were animals kept in a mutilated condition.

 

Very respectfully,

Dr. J.C. McConnell