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Book Reviews from The Civil Abolitionist Spring 2003 Please scroll down for Ideas that changed our world |
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Spring 03 index CivAb index previous page Dr Tony Page: Vivisection Unveiled An expose of the medical futility of animal experimentation 1997 Jon Carpenter Publishing UK $11.99 US Professor Pietro Croce author of the landmark book, Animal Experimentation has written re Vivisection Unveiled: "I do not see how vivisectors could escape the pressing logic (of this book)". According to British physician and writer Vernon Coleman, "No one who reads it can possibly doubt that vivisection is a fraud of Brobdingnagian proportions." The literature revealing the scientific absurdity of vivisecting animals to develop cures for human diseases keeps expanding to such an extent that it seems improbable that the practice of using animals as models for humans has not been consigned to the dust bins of history along with all with all the other archaic customs (e.g. drawing blood to cure illness) that were once considered to be beneficial. This book is dedicated to Dr. Walter R. Hadwen (1854-1932), "Britain's first great scientific antivivisectionist" with frequent acknowledgements of the contributions of living legend Hans Ruesch, a Swiss national, who is frequently described as "the father of the modern scientific anti-vivisection movement". The author's unique contribution to A-V literature is that he allows vivisectors to discredit their own work by repeating what they have said and written to each other, which differs greatly from their claims to the public that all medical advances have been derived from animal experimentation. For example, Dr Frederick Coulston opened a conference prior to the 1980's with these words: "A key issue today, at least in the United States, is the prediction of chemical carcinogenesis from animal data to man. We've all struggled with this problem over the years and there is as yet no real answer, it seems to me. The real answer will be human experience ... " (emphasis added) Yet Coulston and colleagues have still continued to conduct animal experiments that are misleading and even dangerous when applied to human conditions. Past to Present: IDEAS THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD by Dr Stuart and Terry Hirschberg (Prentice Hall, USA, 2002) reported by Deirdre Balaam I just had to come out of temporary retirement to give you news about this book, which came out last year. In view of the fact that the Anglophone media in Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States have done their best to stifle/suppress/ignore what he has to say, it is astonishing to see that Hans Ruesch is included in this august list of writers and thinkers - including Stendhal, Keats, Shaw, Malthus, Baldwin, Orwell, de Beauvoir, Toynbee, Herodotus, Carlyle, Whitman, Kennedy, Darwin, Kolata, Heyderdahl, Hoyle, Plato, Scriptures in Hinduism, the Prophet Mohammad, St Matthew Parables, Darrow, Sartre, Aristotle, Ruskin, Flaubert, Rothstein, de Mille, Berger. The company in which he has been placed is so widely known that one only needs to mention their surnames. This isn't just any old book. As a college textbook, it is targeted at the possibly great thinkers of the future, mainly university students from freshmen to postgraduates. In rightly adding HR's name to Ideas That Changed The World, the authors have 'un-suppressed' him. They have, indeed, quoted some 10 pages from Slaughter of the Innocent, his meticulously researched most famous oeuvre for genuine antivivisectionists. The faux AVs also did/still do a hatchet job on HR, yet the 'innocent' in the title are both humans and animals. Let us not forget that the English edition of Slaughter was removed from circulation in the UK shortly after it was published back in 1978. As we know, it was eventually published in the US. The Great Suppression began almost immediately thereafter. It is soon to be reissued, however, because the demand for it is still strong. ---------- Hans Ruesch's historical review of medicine, Slaughter of the Innocent, first published in Germany, has rekindled the languishing scientific anti-vivisection movement by shocking readers into activism and providing them with the ammunition they needed to carry on the fight. |