Brown Dog affair
Encyclopedia
The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection
that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission
to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss
of the Department of Physiology at University College London had performed illegal dissection before an audience of 60 medical students on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society
. Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, was outraged by the assault on his reputation. He sued for libel and won.
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea
in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque—"Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?"—leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers." On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragette
s, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.
In March 1910, tired of the constant controversy, Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly melted down by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park
in 1985. Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement, the sign on a nearby fence reading, "No Dogs."
Walter Gratzer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at King's College London, writes that a powerful opposition to vivisection arose in England during the reign of Queen Victoria
, represented equally in the House of Commons and House of Lords. At that time, the word "vivisection" was used to describe the dissection of live animals, either with or without anaesthesia, often in front of audiences of medical students. Well-known physiologists such as Claude Bernard
and Charles Richet in France, and Michael Foster
and Burdon Sanderson in England, were frequently pilloried for the work they did. Bernard was a particular target of violent abuse, even from members of his own family. He appears to have shared their distaste, writing that "the science of life ... is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen." Gratzer reports that British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of Bernard's teacher, François Magendie
, where animals were strapped down on boards to be dissected, with Magendie allegedly shouting to the dogs as they struggled: "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!)
The British National Anti-Vivisection Society
(NAVS) was founded in December 1875 by Frances Power Cobbe
, an early feminist and anti-vivisection activist, at a time when there were around 300 experiments on animals each year in the UK.
—criticized by NAVS as "infamous but well-named"—which legalized and attempted to set limits on the practice. The law remained in force for 110 years, until it was replaced by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986
, the subject of similar criticism from the modern animal rights movement.
The 1876 Act stipulated that researchers could not be prosecuted for cruelty, but the animal must be anaesthetized, unless the anaesthesia would interfere with the point of the experiment. Each animal could be used only once, though several procedures regarded as part of the same experiment were permitted. And the animal had to be killed when the study is over, unless doing so would frustrate the object of the experiment. Prosecutions under the Act could be made only with the approval of the Home Secretary, at the time Aretas Akers-Douglas, regarded as unsympathetic to the anti-vivisectionist cause.
In the early twentieth century, Ernest Starling, Professor of Physiology at University College, London, and his brother-in-law, William Bayliss, were using vivisection on dogs to determine whether the nervous system
controls pancreatic
secretions, as postulated by Ivan Pavlov
. They knew that the pancreas produces digestive juices in response to increased acidity in the duodenum
and jejunum
, because of the arrival of chyme
there. By severing the duodenal and jejunal nerves in anaesthetized dogs, while leaving the blood vessels intact, and then introducing acid into the duodenum and jejunum, they discovered that the process is not mediated by a nervous response, but by a new type of chemical reflex. They named the chemical messenger secretin
, because it is secreted by the intestinal lining into the bloodstream, stimulating the pancreas on circulation
.
In 1905, Starling coined the term "hormone"—from the Greek hormao meaning "I arouse" or "I excite"—to describe chemicals such as secretin that are capable, in extremely small quantities, of stimulating organs from a distance. Bayliss and Starling had also used vivisection on anaesthetized dogs to discover peristalsis
in 1899. Over their careers, they went on to discover a variety of other important physiological phenomena and principles, many of which were based on their experimental work involving animal vivisection.
The brown dog was a mongrel of the terrier type, probably a former stray or pet, weighed 14 lb (6 kg), and had short rough hair. He was first used in a vivisection in December 1902 by Starling, who had cut open the dog's abdomen and ligated
the pancreatic duct
. The dog lived in a cage for the next two months, reportedly upsetting people with his howling.
He was brought back to the lecture theatre for another demonstration on 2 February 1903. During this second procedure, he was stretched on his back on an operating board, with his legs tied to the board, his head clamped into position, and his mouth muzzled to keep him quiet. In front of the audience, Starling cut the dog open again to inspect the results of the previous surgery, after which he clamped the wound, then handed the dog over to Bayliss, who wanted to look at the salivary gland
s. Bayliss cut a new opening in the dog's neck to expose the glands. The dog was then stimulated with electricity to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure. Bayliss was unable to show this, and gave up trying after half an hour.
The dog was handed over to a student, Henry Dale
, a future Nobel laureate, who removed the dog's pancreas, then killed him with a knife. Gratzer writes that the dog was anaesthetized during the procedure with a morphine
injection, then with a mixture of chloroform, alcohol, and ether, which was delivered to a tube in the dog's trachea
via a pipe hidden behind the bench the men were working on. He argues that, without anaesthesia, it would have been impossible for the researchers to perform the surgery. Other students present during the surgery said that the dog had not struggled, but had merely twitched.
, a 24-year-old Swedish countess, and Leisa K. Schartau had visited the Pasteur Institute
in Paris in 1900 and were appalled by the use of animals there. On their return to Sweden, they made contact with the Swedish Animal Protection League, and in December 1900 founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden. In 1902, they enrolled as students at the London School of Medicine for Women
—a vivisection-free college that had visiting arrangements with other London colleges—partly to gain medical training, and partly as undercover anti-vivisectionists.
The women attended lectures at King's and University College, keeping a diary that they published in 1903 as Eye-Witnesses, changing the title for the second edition to The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology. Richard Ryder writes that the book was a bombshell, receiving 200 reviews in four months. Of the brown dog, the women wrote that he appeared conscious, and that there was no smell of anaesthesia:
, secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society
(NAVS), and son of a former Lord Chief Justice of England. Coleridge's attention was drawn to the description of the brown dog experiments, because the Cruelty to Animals Act forbade the use of an animal in more than one experiment. Yet it appeared that the brown dog had been used by Starling to perform surgery on the pancreas, used again by him when he opened the dog to inspect the results of the previous surgery, and used for a third time by Bayliss to study the salivary glands. The women said the dog had not been properly anaesthetized, and had been killed by Henry Dale, at the time an unlicensed research student. The women also alleged that the students had laughed during the procedure; there were "jokes and laughter everywhere" in the lecture hall while the dog was being dissected, according to Lind-af-Hageby, an allegation she published in her book under the chapter title "Fun". These allegations were all regarded as prima facie violations of the Act.
Peter Mason writes that Coleridge decided there was no point in relying on a prosecution under the Act, which he regarded as deliberately obstructive. Instead, he gave an angry speech about the allegations to the annual meeting of the National Anti-Vivisection Society at St. James Hall
in May 1903, probably with a view to inciting a suit for libel. The speech included a statement from Lind-af-Hageby: "The dog struggled forcibly during the whole experiment and seemed to suffer extremely during the stimulation. No anaesthetic had been administered in my presence, and the lecturer said nothing about any attempts to anaesthetize the animal having previously been made." Coleridge accused the scientists of having tortured the animal. "If this is not torture, let Mr. Bayliss and his friends ... tell us in Heaven's name what torture is."
Mason writes that a verbatim report of the speech was published the next day by the radical Daily News
—founded by Charles Dickens
—and over the next three days by other national and regional papers. Questions were raised in the House of Commons, particularly by Sir Frederick Banbury
, a Conservative MP and sponsor of a vivisection bill aimed at ending demonstrations of the kind conducted by Starling and Bayliss. On 8 May 1903, Coleridge challenged Bayliss in a letter to the Daily News: "As soon as Dr. Bayliss likes to test the bona fides and accuracy of my public declaration ... he shall be confronted from the witness box by eyewitnesses I rely upon." Bayliss demanded a public apology, and when it failed to materialize, he issued a writ for libel. Starling decided not to sue. Even The Lancet
, a medical journal that was no supporter of Coleridge, wrote that "it may be contended that Professor Starling ... committed a technical infringement of the Act."
and took place over four days, closing on 18 November. The British Medical Journal called it "a test case of the utmost gravity". The Morning Leader described the public gallery as packed and rowdy, with no spare seats or standing room, and queues 30 yards (30 metres) long forming outside the courthouse.
Bayliss's counsel, Rufus Isaacs
, called Starling as his first witness. Starling admitted that he had broken the law by using the dog twice, but said in his defence that he had done so to avoid sacrificing two dogs. The court accepted Bayliss's statement that the brown dog had been anaesthetized with one-and-a-half grains of morphia
and six ounces of alcohol, chloroform, and ether. Bayliss said the dog had been suffering from chorea
, a disease involving involuntary spasm, meaning that any movement the women had witnessed was not purposive. In addition, Bayliss testified that a tracheotomy
had been performed, and that it was therefore impossible for the women to have heard the dog crying and whining, as they had said.
Coleridge's defence called on the two Swedish women as witnesses. They testified that they were the first students to arrive at the lecture hall, and that they saw the dog being brought in. They were left alone with the dog for about two minutes, and examined him themselves. They observed scars from the previous operations, and saw an incision in the neck where two tubes had been placed. They did not smell any anaesthetic, and said they could not see any apparatus delivering anaesthesia or any tubing in the dog's trachea. They said the dog was arching its back and jerking its legs in what they regarded as an effort to escape. When the experiment began, they said, the dog continued to arch its back, "upheave its abdomen," and tremble. The women said they regarded the movement as "violent and purposeful."
Bayliss's lawyer criticized Coleridge for having accepted the women's statements without seeking corroboration, and for speaking about the issue publicly without first approaching Bayliss, though he knew that doing so could lead to litigation. Coleridge replied that he hadn't sought verification because he knew the claims would be denied, and that he continued to regard the women's statement as true.
wrote in 1904 that the ruling was greeted by applause in the court, and Frances Power Cobbe
fell into a depression because of the animus of the public. While The Times declared itself satisfied with the verdict, the Daily News called it a miscarriage of justice, and launched a fund to cover Coleridge's expenses, raising £5,735 within four months. Bayliss donated his damages to UCL for use in research; Gratzer writes that the fund is probably still being used today to buy animals for research.
On 25 November 1903, Ernest Bell of Covent Garden, publisher and printer of The Shambles of Science, apologized to Bayliss for having published the book, and pledged to withdraw it and hand over all remaining copies to Bayliss's solicitors. The Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society, founded by Lind-af-Hageby in 1903, republished the book, printing a fifth edition by 1913. The chapter "Fun", which had caused such offence, was replaced with one called "The Vivisections of the Brown Dog", describing the experiment and the trial.
After the trial, Lind-af-Hageby was approached by Anna Louisa Woodward, founder of the World League Against Vivisection, who suggested the idea of a public memorial. Woodward raised a subscription, and commissioned from sculptor Joseph Whitehead a bronze statue of the dog on top of a granite memorial stone—7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) tall—containing a drinking fountain for human beings, and a lower trough for dogs and horses.
The group turned to the borough of Battersea for a location for the memorial. The area was known as a hotbed of radicalism—proletarian, socialist, belching smoke, and full of slums—and was closely associated with the anti-vivisection movement. Battersea General Hospital refused to perform vivisection or employ doctors who engaged in it, and was known locally as the "Antiviv", or the "Old Anti". The Battersea Dogs Home was well known in London; its chairman, the Duke of Portland
, rejected a request in 1907 that its lost dogs be sold to vivisectors as "not only horrible, but absurd."
Battersea council agreed to provide a space for the statue on its newly completed Latchmere Estate, a housing estate for the working class offering terraced homes at seven and sixpence a week. The statue was unveiled on 15 September 1906 in front of a large crowd—speakers included George Bernard Shaw
and Charlotte Despard
—bearing an inscription described by The New York Times as the "hysterical language customary of anti-vivisectionists" and "a slander on the whole medical profession":
The first action was on 20 November 1907, when a group of University College students, led by undergraduate William Howard Lister, crossed the Thames from the north over to Battersea with a crowbar and a sledgehammer, and tried to attack the statue. Ten of them were arrested. The next day, others protested in Tottenham Court Road
against the fines levied on the ten, and the day after that saw a demonstration of hundreds of students who marched holding effigies
of the brown dog on sticks. The Times reported that they marched down the Strand to burn an effigy of a magistrate, and when it failed to ignite threw it in the Thames.
The rioting reached its height on Tuesday, 10 December 1907, when 100 medical students tried to pull the memorial down. The previous protests had been spontaneous, but this one was organized to coincide with the annual Oxford-Cambridge rugby match at Queen's Club
, West Kensington, the protesters hoping that some of the thousands of Oxbridge students due to attend would swell their numbers. Peter Mason writes that street vendors were selling handkerchiefs with the date of the protest printed on them, and the words "Brown dog's inscription is a lie, and the statuette an insult to the London University."
Toward late afternoon, one group of protesters headed for Battersea, intending to uproot the statue and throw it in the Thames. Driven out of the Latchmere Estate by workers, they proceeded down Battersea Park Road, where they tried unsuccessfully to attack the anti-vivisection hospital. Workers again forced the students back, the Daily Chronicle reporting that, when one student fell from the top of a tram and was injured, the workers shouted it was "the brown dog's revenge."
A second group headed for central London, waving more effigies of the brown dog, joined by a police escort and, briefly, a busker with bagpipes. As the marchers reached Trafalgar Square, they were 1,000 strong, facing 400 police officers, some of them mounted. The students gathered around Nelson's Column
, the ringleaders climbing on to the base of it to make speeches. As students fought with police on the ground, mounted police charged the crowd, scattering them into smaller groups and arresting the stragglers, including one Cambridge undergraduate, Alexander Bowley, who was arrested for "barking like a dog." The fighting continued for hours before the police gained control of the crowd. One local doctor told the South Western Star that the students' failure to hold back the police for longer was a sign of the "utter degeneration" of junior doctors and the Anglo-Saxon race.
Over the following days and weeks, more rioting broke out, with medical and veterinary students uniting. Women's suffrage
meetings were routinely invaded by medical students barking like dogs, and shouting "Down with the Brown Dog!", though the students knew not all suffragettes were anti-vivisectionists. A meeting organized by Millicent Fawcett
was violently invaded on 5 December. Louise Lind-af-Hageby arranged a meeting of anti-vivisectionists at Acton Central Hall on 16 December, and though the meeting was protected by a large guard of Battersea workers, over 100 students managed to smuggle themselves in, and the event deteriorated into an exchange of chairs, fists, and smoke bombs.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the cost of policing the statue. London's police commissioner wrote to Battersea Council to ask whether they would contribute to the cost, which had reached £700 a year. Councillor John Archer
—the first person of African descent to be elected to public office in the UK and later elected Lord Mayor of Battersea—told the Daily Mail that he was amazed by the request, considering Battersea was already paying £22,000 a year in police rates. Other councillors, concerned about a hike in the rates, suggested the statue be encased in a steel cage and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The Canine Defence League
wondered whether, if Battersea were to organize raids on laboratories to destroy vivisection instruments, the laboratories would be required to pay the police costs themselves.
writes that the dog's mongrelly status reflected the extraordinary political coalition that rallied to the statue's defence. The riots saw socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, liberals, and suffragettes descend on Battersea to fight the medical students, even though the suffragettes, identified with the bourgeoisie, were not a group toward whom organized male workers felt any warmth—working-class men did not want to enfranchise the cheap labour of women. But the "Brown Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College" by the male scientific establishment united them.
Coral Lansbury
writes that the causes of feminism and women's suffrage
became closely linked with the anti-vivisection movement. Three of the four vice-presidents of the Battersea General Hospital that refused to allow vivisection were women. Lansbury argues that the Brown Dog affair became a matter of opposing symbols, the iconography of vivisection striking a chord with women. The vivisected dog muzzled and strapped to the operating board blurred into images of suffragettes on hunger strike restrained and force-fed in Brixton Prison; women strapped into the gynaecologist's chair by an all-powerful male medical establishment, forced to have their ovaries and uteruses removed as a cure for "mania
", or strapped down for childbirth. Richard Ryder writes that the dog represented the vulnerability of women; the medical students the machismo of science.
Both sides saw themselves as heirs to the future. Hilda Kean writes that the Swedish protagonists were young and female, anti-establishment and progressive, while the accused scientists, older and male, were viewed as remnants of a previous age. It was the Swedish women's hard-won access to higher education that had made the case possible in the first place, creating a new form of political agitation, a "new form of witnessing", according to Susan Hamilton of the University of Alberta. Against this, Lansbury reports that the students saw the women and the trade unionists as representative of superstition and sentimentality, anti-science, anti-progress—"women of both sexes" defending a brutal, insanitary past—while the students and their teachers were the "New Priesthood."
Battersea Council grew tired of the controversy. A new Conservative council was elected in November 1909 amid talk of removing the statue. There were protests in support of it, and the 500-strong Brown Dog memorial defence committee was established. Twenty thousand people signed a petition, and 1,500 attended a rally in February 1910 addressed by Irish suffragette and Sinn Féin
activist Charlotte Despard
, Liberal MP George Greenwood
, and Louise Lind-af-Hageby. There were demonstrations in central London and speeches in Hyde Park, with supporters wearing masks of dogs.
The protests were to no avail. The statue was quietly removed before dawn on 10 March 1910 by four council workmen accompanied by 120 police officers. It was hidden in a bicycle shed, then believed to have been destroyed by a council blacksmith, who reportedly smashed it then melted it down. Ten days later, 3,000 anti-vivisectionists gathered in Trafalgar Square to demand the return of the statue, but it was clear Battersea Council had turned its back on the affair. Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old Brown Dog is a small hump on the pavement at the centre of Latchmere Recreation Ground, near the Latchmere Pub; the sign on a nearby fence reads "No Dogs."
The New York Times wrote in March 1910 that "it is not considered at all probable that the effigy will ever again be exhibited in a public place," but on 12 December 1985, a new memorial to the brown dog was erected just behind the Pump House in Battersea Park, commissioned by the National Anti-Vivisection Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
, and unveiled by actress Geraldine James
. The new statue, by sculptor Nicola Hicks, is mounted on top of a 5 feet (1.5 m) Portland stone
plinth, the dog based on Hicks' own terrier and described by Mason as "a coquettish contrast to its down-to-earth predecessor." It repeats the original inscription, and adds:
Echoing the fate of the previous memorial, the statue was moved into storage in 1992 by Battersea Park's owners, the Conservative Borough of Wandsworth, as part of a park renovation scheme, according to the council. Anti-vivisectionists, suspicious of the explanation, campaigned for its return. It was reinstated in the park's Woodland Walk in 1994, near the Old English Garden, a more secluded location than before.
Hilda Kean has criticized the new statue. The old Brown Dog was upright and defiant, she writes, not begging for mercy, which made it a radical political statement. The new Brown Dog is a pet, the creator's own terrier, sited in the Old English Garden as "heritage". Quoting David Lowenthal, professor emeritus at UCL, Kean writes that "what heritage does not highlight, it hides." She writes that the new statue has been separated from its anti-vivisection message and from popular images of animal rights activism—the balaclavas of activists and the painful eyes
of rabbits. The new Brown Dog is too safe, she argues. Unlike its controversial ancestor, it makes no one uncomfortable.
Vivisection
Vivisection is defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure...
that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission
Royal Commission
In Commonwealth realms and other monarchies a Royal Commission is a major ad-hoc formal public inquiry into a defined issue. They have been held in various countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia...
to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss
William Bayliss
Sir William Maddock Bayliss was an English physiologist.He was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire and gained a B.Sc from London University. He graduated MA and DSc in physiology from Wadham College, Oxford....
of the Department of Physiology at University College London had performed illegal dissection before an audience of 60 medical students on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society
National Anti-Vivisection Society
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, is a national, not-for-profit animal welfare organization based in London whose purpose is to eliminate product testing, education and biomedical research on animals....
. Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, was outraged by the assault on his reputation. He sued for libel and won.
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea
Battersea
Battersea is an area of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is an inner-city district of South London, situated on the south side of the River Thames, 2.9 miles south-west of Charing Cross. Battersea spans from Fairfield in the west to Queenstown in the east...
in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque—"Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?"—leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers." On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragette
Suffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
s, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.
In March 1910, tired of the constant controversy, Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly melted down by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park
Battersea Park
Battersea Park is a 200 acre green space at Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth in England. It is situated on the south bank of the River Thames opposite Chelsea, and was opened in 1858....
in 1985. Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement, the sign on a nearby fence reading, "No Dogs."
Vivisection
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....
, represented equally in the House of Commons and House of Lords. At that time, the word "vivisection" was used to describe the dissection of live animals, either with or without anaesthesia, often in front of audiences of medical students. Well-known physiologists such as Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
and Charles Richet in France, and Michael Foster
Michael Foster (physiologist)
Sir Michael Foster was an English physiologist.He was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and educated at University College School, London....
and Burdon Sanderson in England, were frequently pilloried for the work they did. Bernard was a particular target of violent abuse, even from members of his own family. He appears to have shared their distaste, writing that "the science of life ... is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen." Gratzer reports that British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of Bernard's teacher, François Magendie
François Magendie
François Magendie was a French physiologist, considered a pioneer of experimental physiology. He is known for describing the foramen of Magendie. There is also a Magendie sign, a downward and inward rotation of the eye due to a lesion in the cerebellum...
, where animals were strapped down on boards to be dissected, with Magendie allegedly shouting to the dogs as they struggled: "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!)
National Anti-Vivisection Society
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, is a national, not-for-profit animal welfare organization based in London whose purpose is to eliminate product testing, education and biomedical research on animals....
(NAVS) was founded in December 1875 by Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe was an Irish writer, social reformer, and suffragist. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.Frances was...
, an early feminist and anti-vivisection activist, at a time when there were around 300 experiments on animals each year in the UK.
Cruelty to Animals Act 1876
The opposition to vivisection led the government to set up the First Royal Commission on Vivisection in July 1875, which recommended that legislation be enacted to control it; the Second Royal Commission was set up in 1906 because of the Brown Dog affair. The first led to the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876Cruelty to Animals Act 1876
The Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 was an Act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom which set limits on the practice of, and instituted a licensing system for animal experimentation, amending the Cruelty to Animals Act 1849...
—criticized by NAVS as "infamous but well-named"—which legalized and attempted to set limits on the practice. The law remained in force for 110 years, until it was replaced by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986
Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986
The Animals Act 1986 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed in 1986, which regulates the use of laboratory animals in the UK. The Act permits experiments to be carried out on animals, including procedures involving vivisection, if certain criteria are met...
, the subject of similar criticism from the modern animal rights movement.
The 1876 Act stipulated that researchers could not be prosecuted for cruelty, but the animal must be anaesthetized, unless the anaesthesia would interfere with the point of the experiment. Each animal could be used only once, though several procedures regarded as part of the same experiment were permitted. And the animal had to be killed when the study is over, unless doing so would frustrate the object of the experiment. Prosecutions under the Act could be made only with the approval of the Home Secretary, at the time Aretas Akers-Douglas, regarded as unsympathetic to the anti-vivisectionist cause.
Ernest Starling and William Bayliss
Nervous system
The nervous system is an organ system containing a network of specialized cells called neurons that coordinate the actions of an animal and transmit signals between different parts of its body. In most animals the nervous system consists of two parts, central and peripheral. The central nervous...
controls pancreatic
Pancreas
The pancreas is a gland organ in the digestive and endocrine system of vertebrates. It is both an endocrine gland producing several important hormones, including insulin, glucagon, and somatostatin, as well as a digestive organ, secreting pancreatic juice containing digestive enzymes that assist...
secretions, as postulated by Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself but was a mathematician and actually had strong distaste for the field....
. They knew that the pancreas produces digestive juices in response to increased acidity in the duodenum
Duodenum
The duodenum is the first section of the small intestine in most higher vertebrates, including mammals, reptiles, and birds. In fish, the divisions of the small intestine are not as clear and the terms anterior intestine or proximal intestine may be used instead of duodenum...
and jejunum
Jejunum
The jejunum is the middle section of the small intestine in most higher vertebrates, including mammals, reptiles, and birds. In fish, the divisions of the small intestine are not as clear and the terms middle intestine or mid-gut may be used instead of jejunum.The jejunum lies between the duodenum...
, because of the arrival of chyme
Chyme
Chyme is the semifluid mass of partly digested food expelled by the stomach into the duodenum.Also known as chymus, it is the liquid substance found in the stomach before passing through the pyloric valve and entering the duodenum...
there. By severing the duodenal and jejunal nerves in anaesthetized dogs, while leaving the blood vessels intact, and then introducing acid into the duodenum and jejunum, they discovered that the process is not mediated by a nervous response, but by a new type of chemical reflex. They named the chemical messenger secretin
Secretin
Secretin is a hormone that controls the secretions into the duodenum, and also separately, water homeostasis throughout the body. It is produced in the S cells of the duodenum in the crypts of Lieberkühn...
, because it is secreted by the intestinal lining into the bloodstream, stimulating the pancreas on circulation
Circulatory system
The circulatory system is an organ system that passes nutrients , gases, hormones, blood cells, etc...
.
In 1905, Starling coined the term "hormone"—from the Greek hormao meaning "I arouse" or "I excite"—to describe chemicals such as secretin that are capable, in extremely small quantities, of stimulating organs from a distance. Bayliss and Starling had also used vivisection on anaesthetized dogs to discover peristalsis
Peristalsis
Peristalsis is a radially symmetrical contraction and relaxation of muscles which propagates in a wave down the muscular tube, in an anterograde fashion. In humans, peristalsis is found in the contraction of smooth muscles to propel contents through the digestive tract. Earthworms use a similar...
in 1899. Over their careers, they went on to discover a variety of other important physiological phenomena and principles, many of which were based on their experimental work involving animal vivisection.
Vivisection of the dog
Ligature (medicine)
In surgery or medical procedure, a ligature consists of a piece of thread tied around an anatomical structure, usually a blood vessel or another hollow structure to shut it off. With a blood vessel the surgeon will clamp the vessel perpendicular to the axis of the artery or vein with a hemostat,...
the pancreatic duct
Pancreatic duct
The pancreatic duct, or duct of Wirsung , is a duct joining the pancreas to the common bile duct to supply pancreatic juices which aid in digestion provided by the "exocrine pancreas"...
. The dog lived in a cage for the next two months, reportedly upsetting people with his howling.
He was brought back to the lecture theatre for another demonstration on 2 February 1903. During this second procedure, he was stretched on his back on an operating board, with his legs tied to the board, his head clamped into position, and his mouth muzzled to keep him quiet. In front of the audience, Starling cut the dog open again to inspect the results of the previous surgery, after which he clamped the wound, then handed the dog over to Bayliss, who wanted to look at the salivary gland
Salivary gland
The salivary glands in mammals are exocrine glands, glands with ducts, that produce saliva. They also secrete amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starch into maltose...
s. Bayliss cut a new opening in the dog's neck to expose the glands. The dog was then stimulated with electricity to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure. Bayliss was unable to show this, and gave up trying after half an hour.
Henry Hallett Dale
Sir Henry Hallett Dale, OM, GBE, PRS was an English pharmacologist and physiologist. For his study of acetylcholine as agent in the chemical transmission of nerve impulses he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Otto Loewi.-Biography:Henry Hallett Dale was born in Islington,...
, a future Nobel laureate, who removed the dog's pancreas, then killed him with a knife. Gratzer writes that the dog was anaesthetized during the procedure with a morphine
Morphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
injection, then with a mixture of chloroform, alcohol, and ether, which was delivered to a tube in the dog's trachea
Vertebrate trachea
In tetrapod anatomy the trachea, or windpipe, is a tube that connects the pharynx or larynx to the lungs, allowing the passage of air. It is lined with pseudostratified ciliated columnar epithelium cells with goblet cells that produce mucus...
via a pipe hidden behind the bench the men were working on. He argues that, without anaesthesia, it would have been impossible for the researchers to perform the surgery. Other students present during the surgery said that the dog had not struggled, but had merely twitched.
Infiltration by Swedish students
Unknown to Starling and Bayliss, their lectures had been infiltrated by two Swedish activists. Louise "Lizzy" Lind-af-HagebyLouise Lind-af-Hageby
Emilie Augusta Louise "Lizzy" Lind-af-Hageby was a Swedish countess, feminist, and animal rights advocate...
, a 24-year-old Swedish countess, and Leisa K. Schartau had visited the Pasteur Institute
Pasteur Institute
The Pasteur Institute is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who made some of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine at the time, including pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax...
in Paris in 1900 and were appalled by the use of animals there. On their return to Sweden, they made contact with the Swedish Animal Protection League, and in December 1900 founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden. In 1902, they enrolled as students at the London School of Medicine for Women
London School of Medicine for Women
The London School of Medicine for Women was established in 1874 and was the first medical school in Britain to train women.The school was formed by an association of pioneering women physicians Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Blackwell with Thomas Henry...
—a vivisection-free college that had visiting arrangements with other London colleges—partly to gain medical training, and partly as undercover anti-vivisectionists.
The women attended lectures at King's and University College, keeping a diary that they published in 1903 as Eye-Witnesses, changing the title for the second edition to The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology. Richard Ryder writes that the book was a bombshell, receiving 200 reviews in four months. Of the brown dog, the women wrote that he appeared conscious, and that there was no smell of anaesthesia:
A large dog, stretched on its back on an operation board, is carried into the lecture-room by the demonstrator and the laboratory attendant. Its legs are fixed to the board, its head is firmly held in the usual manner, and it is tightly muzzled. There is a large incision on the side of the neck, exposing the gland. The animal exhibits all the signs of intense suffering; in his struggles, he again and again lifts his body from the board, and makes powerful attempts to get free. The lecturer, attired in the blood-stained surplice of the priest of vivisection, has tucked up his sleeves and is now comfortably smoking a pipe, whilst with hands coloured crimson he arranges the electrical circuit for the stimulation that will follow. Now and then, he makes a funny remark, which is appreciated by those around him.
Involvement of the National Anti-Vivisection Society
Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau decided to show their diary to the barrister Stephen ColeridgeStephen Coleridge
Stephen William Buchanan Coleridge was a UK author, barrister, opponent of vivisection and co-founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children....
, secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society
National Anti-Vivisection Society
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, is a national, not-for-profit animal welfare organization based in London whose purpose is to eliminate product testing, education and biomedical research on animals....
(NAVS), and son of a former Lord Chief Justice of England. Coleridge's attention was drawn to the description of the brown dog experiments, because the Cruelty to Animals Act forbade the use of an animal in more than one experiment. Yet it appeared that the brown dog had been used by Starling to perform surgery on the pancreas, used again by him when he opened the dog to inspect the results of the previous surgery, and used for a third time by Bayliss to study the salivary glands. The women said the dog had not been properly anaesthetized, and had been killed by Henry Dale, at the time an unlicensed research student. The women also alleged that the students had laughed during the procedure; there were "jokes and laughter everywhere" in the lecture hall while the dog was being dissected, according to Lind-af-Hageby, an allegation she published in her book under the chapter title "Fun". These allegations were all regarded as prima facie violations of the Act.
St James's Church, Piccadilly
St James’s Church, Piccadilly is an Anglican church on Piccadilly in the centre of London, UK. It was designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren....
in May 1903, probably with a view to inciting a suit for libel. The speech included a statement from Lind-af-Hageby: "The dog struggled forcibly during the whole experiment and seemed to suffer extremely during the stimulation. No anaesthetic had been administered in my presence, and the lecturer said nothing about any attempts to anaesthetize the animal having previously been made." Coleridge accused the scientists of having tortured the animal. "If this is not torture, let Mr. Bayliss and his friends ... tell us in Heaven's name what torture is."
Mason writes that a verbatim report of the speech was published the next day by the radical Daily News
News Chronicle
The News Chronicle was a British daily newspaper. It ceased publication on 17 October 1960, being absorbed into the Daily Mail. Its offices were in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 8DP, England.-Daily Chronicle:...
—founded by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
—and over the next three days by other national and regional papers. Questions were raised in the House of Commons, particularly by Sir Frederick Banbury
Frederick Banbury, 1st Baron Banbury of Southam
Frederick George Banbury, 1st Baron Banbury of Southam PC , known as Sir Frederick Banbury, 1st Baronet, from 1903 to 1924, was a British businessman and Conservative Member of Parliament....
, a Conservative MP and sponsor of a vivisection bill aimed at ending demonstrations of the kind conducted by Starling and Bayliss. On 8 May 1903, Coleridge challenged Bayliss in a letter to the Daily News: "As soon as Dr. Bayliss likes to test the bona fides and accuracy of my public declaration ... he shall be confronted from the witness box by eyewitnesses I rely upon." Bayliss demanded a public apology, and when it failed to materialize, he issued a writ for libel. Starling decided not to sue. Even The Lancet
The Lancet
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals...
, a medical journal that was no supporter of Coleridge, wrote that "it may be contended that Professor Starling ... committed a technical infringement of the Act."
Bayliss v. Coleridge
The trial began on 11 November 1903 before Lord Chief Justice Lord Alverstone at the Royal Courts of JusticeRoyal Courts of Justice
The Royal Courts of Justice, commonly called the Law Courts, is the building in London which houses the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and the High Court of Justice of England and Wales...
and took place over four days, closing on 18 November. The British Medical Journal called it "a test case of the utmost gravity". The Morning Leader described the public gallery as packed and rowdy, with no spare seats or standing room, and queues 30 yards (30 metres) long forming outside the courthouse.
Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading
Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, PC, KC , was an English lawyer, jurist and politician...
, called Starling as his first witness. Starling admitted that he had broken the law by using the dog twice, but said in his defence that he had done so to avoid sacrificing two dogs. The court accepted Bayliss's statement that the brown dog had been anaesthetized with one-and-a-half grains of morphia
Morphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
and six ounces of alcohol, chloroform, and ether. Bayliss said the dog had been suffering from chorea
Chorea (disease)
Choreia is an abnormal involuntary movement disorder, one of a group of neurological disorders called dyskinesias. The term choreia is derived from the Greek word χορεία , see choreia , as the quick movements of the feet or hands are vaguely comparable to dancing or piano playing.The term...
, a disease involving involuntary spasm, meaning that any movement the women had witnessed was not purposive. In addition, Bayliss testified that a tracheotomy
Tracheotomy
Among the oldest described surgical procedures, tracheotomy consists of making an incision on the anterior aspect of the neck and opening a direct airway through an incision in the trachea...
had been performed, and that it was therefore impossible for the women to have heard the dog crying and whining, as they had said.
Coleridge's defence called on the two Swedish women as witnesses. They testified that they were the first students to arrive at the lecture hall, and that they saw the dog being brought in. They were left alone with the dog for about two minutes, and examined him themselves. They observed scars from the previous operations, and saw an incision in the neck where two tubes had been placed. They did not smell any anaesthetic, and said they could not see any apparatus delivering anaesthesia or any tubing in the dog's trachea. They said the dog was arching its back and jerking its legs in what they regarded as an effort to escape. When the experiment began, they said, the dog continued to arch its back, "upheave its abdomen," and tremble. The women said they regarded the movement as "violent and purposeful."
Verdict
Lord Alverstone told the jury the case was an important one of national interest, and that they should not be swayed by arguments on the validity of vivisection. After retiring for 25 minutes, the jury unanimously found that Bayliss had been defamed, and on 18 November 1903 he was awarded £2,000 with £3,000 costs, worth around £400,000 in 2008. There are conflicting views as to how popular a decision this was. The Edinburgh Medical JournalScottish Medical Journal
The Scottish Medical Journal is a general medical journal, which publishes original research in all branches of medicine, review articles, history of medicine articles, and clinical memoranda...
wrote in 1904 that the ruling was greeted by applause in the court, and Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe was an Irish writer, social reformer, and suffragist. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.Frances was...
fell into a depression because of the animus of the public. While The Times declared itself satisfied with the verdict, the Daily News called it a miscarriage of justice, and launched a fund to cover Coleridge's expenses, raising £5,735 within four months. Bayliss donated his damages to UCL for use in research; Gratzer writes that the fund is probably still being used today to buy animals for research.
On 25 November 1903, Ernest Bell of Covent Garden, publisher and printer of The Shambles of Science, apologized to Bayliss for having published the book, and pledged to withdraw it and hand over all remaining copies to Bayliss's solicitors. The Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society, founded by Lind-af-Hageby in 1903, republished the book, printing a fifth edition by 1913. The chapter "Fun", which had caused such offence, was replaced with one called "The Vivisections of the Brown Dog", describing the experiment and the trial.
Brown Dog memorial
The group turned to the borough of Battersea for a location for the memorial. The area was known as a hotbed of radicalism—proletarian, socialist, belching smoke, and full of slums—and was closely associated with the anti-vivisection movement. Battersea General Hospital refused to perform vivisection or employ doctors who engaged in it, and was known locally as the "Antiviv", or the "Old Anti". The Battersea Dogs Home was well known in London; its chairman, the Duke of Portland
William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland
William John Arthur Charles James Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland KG, GCVO, PC, TD, DL , known as William Cavendish-Bentinck until 1879, was a British landowner, courtier and Conservative politician...
, rejected a request in 1907 that its lost dogs be sold to vivisectors as "not only horrible, but absurd."
Battersea council agreed to provide a space for the statue on its newly completed Latchmere Estate, a housing estate for the working class offering terraced homes at seven and sixpence a week. The statue was unveiled on 15 September 1906 in front of a large crowd—speakers included George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
and Charlotte Despard
Charlotte Despard
Charlotte Despard was a British-born, later Irish-based suffragist, novelist and Sinn Féin activist....
—bearing an inscription described by The New York Times as the "hysterical language customary of anti-vivisectionists" and "a slander on the whole medical profession":
Riots
Medical students at London's teaching hospitals were enraged by the plaque. The first year of the statue's existence was a quiet one, while University College explored whether they could take legal action over it, but from November 1907 onwards the students turned Battersea into the scene of frequent disruption.The first action was on 20 November 1907, when a group of University College students, led by undergraduate William Howard Lister, crossed the Thames from the north over to Battersea with a crowbar and a sledgehammer, and tried to attack the statue. Ten of them were arrested. The next day, others protested in Tottenham Court Road
Tottenham Court Road
Tottenham Court Road is a major road in central London, United Kingdom, running from St Giles Circus north to Euston Road, near the border of the City of Westminster and the London Borough of Camden, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile...
against the fines levied on the ten, and the day after that saw a demonstration of hundreds of students who marched holding effigies
Effigy
An effigy is a representation of a person, especially in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional form.The term is usually associated with full-length figures of a deceased person depicted in stone or wood on church monuments. These most often lie supine with hands together in prayer,...
of the brown dog on sticks. The Times reported that they marched down the Strand to burn an effigy of a magistrate, and when it failed to ignite threw it in the Thames.
The rioting reached its height on Tuesday, 10 December 1907, when 100 medical students tried to pull the memorial down. The previous protests had been spontaneous, but this one was organized to coincide with the annual Oxford-Cambridge rugby match at Queen's Club
Queen's Club
The Queen's Club is a private sporting club in West Kensington, London, England. Founded in 1886, the Queen's Club was the world's first multipurpose sports complex and named after Queen Victoria, its first patron...
, West Kensington, the protesters hoping that some of the thousands of Oxbridge students due to attend would swell their numbers. Peter Mason writes that street vendors were selling handkerchiefs with the date of the protest printed on them, and the words "Brown dog's inscription is a lie, and the statuette an insult to the London University."
Toward late afternoon, one group of protesters headed for Battersea, intending to uproot the statue and throw it in the Thames. Driven out of the Latchmere Estate by workers, they proceeded down Battersea Park Road, where they tried unsuccessfully to attack the anti-vivisection hospital. Workers again forced the students back, the Daily Chronicle reporting that, when one student fell from the top of a tram and was injured, the workers shouted it was "the brown dog's revenge."
A second group headed for central London, waving more effigies of the brown dog, joined by a police escort and, briefly, a busker with bagpipes. As the marchers reached Trafalgar Square, they were 1,000 strong, facing 400 police officers, some of them mounted. The students gathered around Nelson's Column
Nelson's Column
Nelson's Column is a monument in Trafalgar Square in central London built to commemorate Admiral Horatio Nelson, who died at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The monument was constructed between 1840 and 1843 to a design by William Railton at a cost of £47,000. It is a column of the Corinthian...
, the ringleaders climbing on to the base of it to make speeches. As students fought with police on the ground, mounted police charged the crowd, scattering them into smaller groups and arresting the stragglers, including one Cambridge undergraduate, Alexander Bowley, who was arrested for "barking like a dog." The fighting continued for hours before the police gained control of the crowd. One local doctor told the South Western Star that the students' failure to hold back the police for longer was a sign of the "utter degeneration" of junior doctors and the Anglo-Saxon race.
Over the following days and weeks, more rioting broke out, with medical and veterinary students uniting. Women's suffrage
Suffrage
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply the franchise, distinct from mere voting rights, is the civil right to vote gained through the democratic process...
meetings were routinely invaded by medical students barking like dogs, and shouting "Down with the Brown Dog!", though the students knew not all suffragettes were anti-vivisectionists. A meeting organized by Millicent Fawcett
Millicent Fawcett
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, GBE was an English suffragist and an early feminist....
was violently invaded on 5 December. Louise Lind-af-Hageby arranged a meeting of anti-vivisectionists at Acton Central Hall on 16 December, and though the meeting was protected by a large guard of Battersea workers, over 100 students managed to smuggle themselves in, and the event deteriorated into an exchange of chairs, fists, and smoke bombs.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the cost of policing the statue. London's police commissioner wrote to Battersea Council to ask whether they would contribute to the cost, which had reached £700 a year. Councillor John Archer
John Archer (British politician)
John Richard Archer was a British race and political activist. In November 1906, he and Henry Sylvester-Williams became among the first people of African descent to be elected to public office in Britain, with Archer becoming a councillor and later Mayor in Battersea.Archer was born to Richard...
—the first person of African descent to be elected to public office in the UK and later elected Lord Mayor of Battersea—told the Daily Mail that he was amazed by the request, considering Battersea was already paying £22,000 a year in police rates. Other councillors, concerned about a hike in the rates, suggested the statue be encased in a steel cage and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The Canine Defence League
Dogs Trust
Dogs Trust, formerly known as the National Canine Defence League, is an animal welfare charity and humane society in the United Kingdom which specialises in the wellbeing of dogs. The charity rehabilitates and finds new homes for dogs which have been abandoned or given up by their owners...
wondered whether, if Battersea were to organize raids on laboratories to destroy vivisection instruments, the laboratories would be required to pay the police costs themselves.
Strange relationships
Susan McHugh of the University of New EnglandUniversity of New England, Maine
The University of New England is an independent, coeducational university with two campuses in Maine: the main campus in Biddeford and another in Portland.- History :...
writes that the dog's mongrelly status reflected the extraordinary political coalition that rallied to the statue's defence. The riots saw socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, liberals, and suffragettes descend on Battersea to fight the medical students, even though the suffragettes, identified with the bourgeoisie, were not a group toward whom organized male workers felt any warmth—working-class men did not want to enfranchise the cheap labour of women. But the "Brown Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College" by the male scientific establishment united them.
Coral Lansbury
Coral Lansbury
-Parents and family:Coral Lansbury was born in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Her parents were Oscar Vincent Stephen Lansbury and his wife, May . They were touring Australia in a production of the musical Showboat, and were stranded by the Great Depression...
writes that the causes of feminism and women's suffrage
Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom
Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom as a national movement began in 1872. Women were not prohibited from voting in the United Kingdom until the 1832 Reform Act and the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act...
became closely linked with the anti-vivisection movement. Three of the four vice-presidents of the Battersea General Hospital that refused to allow vivisection were women. Lansbury argues that the Brown Dog affair became a matter of opposing symbols, the iconography of vivisection striking a chord with women. The vivisected dog muzzled and strapped to the operating board blurred into images of suffragettes on hunger strike restrained and force-fed in Brixton Prison; women strapped into the gynaecologist's chair by an all-powerful male medical establishment, forced to have their ovaries and uteruses removed as a cure for "mania
Female hysteria
Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by modern medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the...
", or strapped down for childbirth. Richard Ryder writes that the dog represented the vulnerability of women; the medical students the machismo of science.
Both sides saw themselves as heirs to the future. Hilda Kean writes that the Swedish protagonists were young and female, anti-establishment and progressive, while the accused scientists, older and male, were viewed as remnants of a previous age. It was the Swedish women's hard-won access to higher education that had made the case possible in the first place, creating a new form of political agitation, a "new form of witnessing", according to Susan Hamilton of the University of Alberta. Against this, Lansbury reports that the students saw the women and the trade unionists as representative of superstition and sentimentality, anti-science, anti-progress—"women of both sexes" defending a brutal, insanitary past—while the students and their teachers were the "New Priesthood."
"Exit the 'Brown Dog'"
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin is a left wing, Irish republican political party in Ireland. The name is Irish for "ourselves" or "we ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". Originating in the Sinn Féin organisation founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it took its current form in 1970...
activist Charlotte Despard
Charlotte Despard
Charlotte Despard was a British-born, later Irish-based suffragist, novelist and Sinn Féin activist....
, Liberal MP George Greenwood
George Greenwood
Sir George Greenwood , was a British lawyer, politician, cricketer, animal welfare reformer and Shakespearean scholar.-Life and work:...
, and Louise Lind-af-Hageby. There were demonstrations in central London and speeches in Hyde Park, with supporters wearing masks of dogs.
The protests were to no avail. The statue was quietly removed before dawn on 10 March 1910 by four council workmen accompanied by 120 police officers. It was hidden in a bicycle shed, then believed to have been destroyed by a council blacksmith, who reportedly smashed it then melted it down. Ten days later, 3,000 anti-vivisectionists gathered in Trafalgar Square to demand the return of the statue, but it was clear Battersea Council had turned its back on the affair. Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old Brown Dog is a small hump on the pavement at the centre of Latchmere Recreation Ground, near the Latchmere Pub; the sign on a nearby fence reads "No Dogs."
Memorial restored
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection is a British animal protection and advocacy group that campaigns for the abolition of all animal experiments...
, and unveiled by actress Geraldine James
Geraldine James
Geraldine James, OBE is an English actress.-Early life and family:James was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, to a cardiologist father...
. The new statue, by sculptor Nicola Hicks, is mounted on top of a 5 feet (1.5 m) Portland stone
Portland stone
Portland stone is a limestone from the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The quarries consist of beds of white-grey limestone separated by chert beds. It has been used extensively as a building stone throughout the British Isles, notably in major...
plinth, the dog based on Hicks' own terrier and described by Mason as "a coquettish contrast to its down-to-earth predecessor." It repeats the original inscription, and adds:
Hilda Kean has criticized the new statue. The old Brown Dog was upright and defiant, she writes, not begging for mercy, which made it a radical political statement. The new Brown Dog is a pet, the creator's own terrier, sited in the Old English Garden as "heritage". Quoting David Lowenthal, professor emeritus at UCL, Kean writes that "what heritage does not highlight, it hides." She writes that the new statue has been separated from its anti-vivisection message and from popular images of animal rights activism—the balaclavas of activists and the painful eyes
Draize test
The Draize Test is an acute toxicity test devised in 1944 by Food and Drug Administration toxicologists John H. Draize and Jacob M. Spines...
of rabbits. The new Brown Dog is too safe, she argues. Unlike its controversial ancestor, it makes no one uncomfortable.
Further reading
- Location of the new Brown Dog, Old English Garden, Battersea Park on WikimapiaWikimapiaWikiMapia is a privately owned, online map and satellite imaging resource that combines Google Maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information, in the form of a note, to any location on Earth. Users may currently use this information for free...
. 51°28′50.34"N 0°9′44.17"W - Location of the old Brown Dog (now empty), Latchmere Recreation Ground on Wikimapia. 51°28′18.47"N 0°9′42.55"W
- Bayliss, Leonard (1957). "The 'Brown Dog' Affair' in Potential, the UCL Physiology magazine, Spring 1957, No. 2, pp. 11–22. Leonard Bayliss was the son of William Bayliss.
- British Medical Journal (1903). Bayliss v. Coleridge, trial transcript, 21 November 1903, accessed 12 May 2010.
- Coult, Tony (1998). The Strange Affair of the Brown Dog, a radio play based on Peter Mason's The Brown Dog Affair, accessed 12 May 2010.
- Galloway, John (1998). Review of Peter Mason's The Brown Dog Affair in NatureNature (journal)Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, 394, 635–636, 13 August 1998, accessed 12 May 2010. - Greek, C. Ray & Swingle Greek, Jean (2002). Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-1226-2
- Harte, Negley, and North, John (1991). The World of UCL, 1828–1990, Routledge. The 1991 edition has an image of the restaged experiment on p. 127.
- Kean, Hilda (1995). "The 'Smooth Cool Men of Science': The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection", History Workshop Journal, 40: 16–38.
- Liddick, Donald R. & Liddick, Donald R. Jnr. (2006). Eco-terrorism: Radical Environmental And Animal Liberation Movements. Praegar Publishers. ISBN 0-275-98535-0
- Lind-af-Hageby, L. (ed.). The Anti-Vivisection Review. The Journal of Constructive Anti-Vivisection, journal founded by Louise Lind-af-Hageby.
- London Books. The Brown Dog Affair by Peter Mason, accessed 12 May 2010.