Canadians for the Advancement of Health Research::. alternatives to animal research

INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH

"We sacrificed daily from one to three dogs, besides rabbits and other animals, and after four years experience, I am of the opinion that not one of these experiments on animals was justified or necessary." --Dr. George Hoggan (1875), student of Claude Bernard, MD, a leading and ardent vivisectionist. Bernard (1813 — 1878) was France’s most famous physiologist.

Because dissecting corpses was prohibited in the ancient Greece, the anatomy of the human body and its physiology had remained a mystery for many centuries. Aristotle dissected numerous dead animals, patiently observing the different forms of life before he created a hierarchy in which non-humans were considered lesser beings because they lacked a soul.

In contrast to Hippocrates, four centuries before Christ, who believed that no frontier existed between medicine and philosophy, Aristotle drew conclusions about living organisms from observations and not so much from philosophical cogitation. The quest for medicine has been a long and uneasy endeavour.

Click in the following link for a synopsis:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH: The difficult path of medical science.

Administrative inertia and corporate influence delay raisonable methods of human-based research and testing, and instead mandate the century-old use of animal models. Well-meaning but ill-inspired US scientists and politicians, during the 1950s, promulgated the legal and systematic testing of all new chemicals on animals, while they knew the flaws and dangers that such a decision would cause to public health.

Here are some examples of famous self-experiments that some doctors have carried out, thinking that animal models would not help.
SELF-EXPERIMENTATION

What's behind penicillin? The wonder antibiotic that came at the right time to treat World War II soldiers.

PENICILLIN

To know more about the history of medical science, read the following book for more information:

Hans Ruesh. Slaughter of the Innocent.Animals in Medical Research, the Myth, the Perpetrators, The Damage to Human Being. Reissued in 1983 by Civitas Publications, previously published in the USA by Bantam Books in 1978 (ISBN 0-553-11151-5.