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Die alten Märtyrer der Wissenschaft, dei frösche
(Frogs are the old martyrs of science)
Herman von Helmholtz (1821 – 1894)
Professor of Physiology, University of Heidelberg
In the 1847 edition of the Archives of Anatomy, Helmholtz authored a succinct homage dedicated to laboratory frogs. He extolled the role played by these amphibians in advancing the realms of physiological and biochemical experimentation during the initial decades of the 19th century.
The enduring vitality exhibited by frog tissue after the animal’s brain is scrambled facilitated protracted and rigorous investigative undertakings. In contrast, endeavors to replicate such procedures employing tissues extracted from warm-blooded organisms, albeit possessing similar characteristics, proved to be a vexing pursuit during that era. The prevailing laboratory methodologies of the time lacked the requisite sophistication to sustain the viability of homeothermic tissue following its isolation from a living, pulsating organism.
Even in contemporary pedagogical settings, such as secondary and tertiary biology laboratories, maintaining in vivo homeothermic tissue remains a challenge. Consequently, live frogs persist as the preferred instructional laboratory subjects. Reflecting upon Helmholtz’s insights over a century and a half later, one might aptly surmise: “Frösche sind die Märtyrer der Biologieausbildung” — Frogs are the martyrs of biological education.
Stupidity and Science
(Meeting of Medical Professors)
Operating Professor. “By this experiment, we have ascertained that we can alleviate the suffering of thousands of our fellow creatures! I may further add–”
Policeman (interrupting). “No, you mayn’t! We’ve had enough of this sort of thing! You must move on!” Professor. “ ‘ Move on?’ We can’t move on if you interfere!”
The satirical London magazine, Punch, ran a cartoon depicting a group of well-known physicians being ordered to halt their studies of a living frog by a constable of the law. Tucked under the officer’s arm is a copy of the bill proposed to parliament, limiting the legal use of live animal experimentation. After the Norwich Affair, Punch supported the passage of a law to restrict the practice, but as the issue was argued publicly, the magazine shifted to opposing the bill’s passage. Most of the other popular papers of the time also opposed the bill. Nevertheless, it was signed into law one month after the issue of Punch was published on August 15. 1876. Titled the Animal Protection Act, it placed some restrictions on vivisection but primarily allowed the practice to continue. It fell short of what the antivivisectionists wanted.
The physician, Sir William Jenner (1815-1898), stands with a scalpel and a magnifying glass. He responds to the constable’s demands by listing some knowledge gained through the vivisection of animals. William Jenner was the researcher who discovered that typhoid fever and typhus fever were two distinct diseases. Sir William is of no relation to Sir Edward Jenner, the physician famed as the Father of Inoculation for his experimentation with smallpox and cowpox on living humans.
Sitting at the table next to Jenner is Ernest Hart (1835-1898), editor of the British Medical Journal from 1866 to 1898. His editorials in the BMJ argued the medical importance of vivisection.
Sir James Paget, an outspoken pro-vivisection campaigner, stands immediately to the left of Jenner. He is noted for medically describing a condition of his own affliction, eponymously named Paget’s disease. The affliction causes bone remodeling and weakening of bones as one ages. Paget’s character study in Vanity Fair reveals signs that he may have the affliction.
The observer standing to the far right, shown only in profile, is Sir William Withey Gull (1816 – 1890). Gull was the personal physician to Prince Albert and a staunch supporter of vivisection. He is the first physician to describe anorexia nervosa as a medical condition in the British Medical Journal. But there is more. Contemporary authors of several books about the London serial killer Jack the Ripper have made reasonably good arguments that Sir Gull was Jack the Ripper. A BBC documentary also casts him in that role. Jack the Ripper’s trademark style was cutting the throats of his victims and then gutting them, assumed in that order. It has never been proven that Gull was Jack the Ripper, but it seems he has found his way to an appropriate table.
The Brown Dog Affair Put Vivisection in the Limelight
In the summer of 1874, during the British Medical Association’s annual meeting at the Masonic Hall in Norwich, French physiologist Valentine Magnan* was invited to present his research on alcohol’s physiological effects, explicitly focusing on the hypothesis that excessive consumption of absinthe could induce epilepsy. His lecture concluded with a live demonstration involving two medium-sized dogs, secured and exposed for intravenous injections—one with alcohol and the other with absinthe. The animals’ visible distress and vocal agony incited several audience members to protest, led by prominent figures such as Samuel Haughton of Trinity College and T. Jolliffe Tufnell, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland.
While the dog injected with absinthe howled in agony, eventually succumbing to severe convulsions, Tufnell intervened physically, freeing the alcohol-injected dog and releasing several caged cats as he ran from the building. The lecture culminated with Tufnell’s return with the police officers to arrest Magnan and his assistants on charges of animal cruelty. (Punch, 12/19/1874).
No one was physically arrested, but Magnan and the three assistants were charged with animal cruelty under England’s Martin’s Act of 1835. An act was initially written to provide a legal means of ending “bull baiting” and cockpit fights in England. The bill loosely addressed dog mistreatment but otherwise exempted farm animals from regulation. Publicly beating an exhausted horse to drive it to keep pulling an overloaded wagon was a legal and not uncommonly witnessed practice. This public abuse spurred Anna Sewell (1820-1878) to write her children’s book Black Beauty. Magnan departed for France before the charges came to trial, but his British lecture assistants faced legal proceedings and public scrutiny. The court ultimately sided with the defense, accepting the argument that the dogs were sufficiently anesthetized. Nonetheless, the incident propelled the controversial issue of live animal experimentation into the public arena, catalyzing significant press coverage and societal debate.
This controversy coincided with burgeoning animal protection movements, notably Frances Power Cobbe’s “Victoria Street Society,” formally named the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection Society. The discourse attracted scientific luminaries such as T.H. Huxley, Richard Owen, and Charles Darwin, as well as those depicted in the Punch cartoon above, to publicly support the practice of vertebrate vivisection.
Legislatively, the outcry led to the Animal Protection Act of 1876, which introduced stringent regulations on using live vertebrates in scientific research and education in England and imposed licensing requirements, mandates for anesthesia, and stipulations for humane treatment post-experimentation. This act laid foundational legal standards for animal welfare in scientific contexts, which are upheld in English law, with minor modifications, until it was replaced 110 years later by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.
*Erroneously identified as Eugene Magnan in the court records.
Animal Rights
One aspect of the anti-vivisection argument made today that would have been totally alien to the thinking of the time is that of “animal rights.” During Victorian times, livestock was herded up London’s main streets and up Battersea Hill to the slaughterhouse. Horses would be worked until they dropped, and then they would be dragged off to the knacker’s yard. Women did not have the right to vote and felt poorly treated by the male-dominated medical practices of the time. (Lansbury) These factors drew the suffragettes to the anti-vivisection movement, which aimed to protect the vulnerable. Labor parties also identified with the anti-vivisection movement, as it was primarily an educated upper-class establishment that supported vivisection. Workers felt that they, being in the lower classes, were treated with equal impunity as animals.
A Personal Review of Living Tissue Use In College Biology During the 1970s.
Live frogs were a major part of the General Biology laboratory syllabus at the college where I taught during the 1970s. Hundreds of frogs were sacrificed every semester, providing the live tissue needed for the general biology course’s physiology exercises. Following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, American politics allocated considerable funds to undergraduate science education. The influx of money enabled every lab bench, each serving six students in the non-major labs, to be equipped with a physiograph and the instrument’s accessory modules. Providing small working groups of non-majors with first-hand experience performing many classic heart, muscle, respiration, and neurological exercises was an item of departmental pride. The in-house generated laboratory manual frequently used physiographs, not only with frogs but also by “wiring up” students as subjects to measure human physiological responses to exercise. Additionally, it involved popular methods such as plunging a student’s head into a bucket of water while recording their dive reflex, if any, on a physiograph.
A laboratory sink full of hopping frogs was the source of the living tissue for the physiograph exercises. Students had the option to learn how to pith a frog themselves, work with one previously “prepared,” or absent themselves from the lab until the deed was done and return as observers of the directed exercises. The course description in the college catalog informed prospective students that dissections were a required part of the course. The introduction to using living frog tissue began with the instructor demonstrating the pithing procedure to the class. For my classes, while holding a frog high enough for all to see, I would flex the struggling amphibian’s head over my thumb, revealing the junction point beneath the skin between its skull and cervical vertebra. When done well, the next step is quick and efficient. A dissecting needle would be inserted into the animal’s brain cavity through the base of the skull, and with an adroit wiggle of the needle’s wooden handle, the frog’s brain scrambled. Should that day’s exercise require using a double-pithed frog, the needle would be withdrawn from the skull cavity, reversed in direction, and plunged through the vertebra’s neural arch, obliterating spinal cord reflexes. A frog becomes the supplier of living tissue in less than thirty seconds. Tossed onto a dissecting tray, the once-struggling animal lands with an unresponsive splat – no bleeding, no movement, no moaning, but with a heart still beating.
A scientist, holding a scalpel, is interrupted from cutting a live rabbit by angry antivivisectionists on his right while spirits of those who died from medical conditions are on his left, pleading for him to continue learning about diseases. The Anti-Vivisection Debate In America. Punch Newspaper, New York, (1911) Vol. 69, No. 1773 Chromolithograph, Centerfold
Another Horrible Analogy From Medical History
In hindsight, the clinical efficiency with which frog pithing demonstrations were carried out conjures images of neurosurgeon Walter Freeman’s fabled transorbital frontal or “icepick” lobotomy lecture demonstrations, which arguably can be described as a “medical roadshow.” During the 1950s, Freeman traveled about the country, demonstrating his procedure to perform quick, bloodless lobotomies at hundreds of mental health facilities.
Reportedly, at the height of Freeman’s career, he would hold a knitting needle-like device in each hand and simultaneously plunge it through the left and right eye sockets of a psychiatric patient chemically rendered unconscious—with a boastful display of ambidexterity. Without interrupting the flow of his lecture to a now gasping audience, Freeman would give each of the foot-long probes an additional thrust, but this time adding what he termed “my adroit wiggle.” This extra touch was necessary to sever the neuronal connections between the patient’s frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
Freeman toured the country performing live lobotomies before audiences, promoting his techniques as a fast, easy, and cheap procedure. One that could be performed even in sanitariums lacking operating facilities. There was no visible scarring to upset visiting relatives, as the needles were inserted under the patient’s upper eyelids. Freeman’s technique was so quick and easy that even sanitariums unequipped to administer anesthesia could perform lobotomies. As long as an electro-convulsive shock therapy device was available, a patient could be knocked senseless long enough to do the procedure. Estimates are that Freeman performed over two thousand five hundred lobotomies during his career. (Caruso, 2017)
The Day Vivisection Died at NCC
During the 1980s, the use of live vertebrates in Nassau Community College’s (NCC) biology classes declined due to budgetary reasons. Then, in January of 1989, all live animal laboratory experimentation and demonstrations on campus came to a screeching halt upon a presidential edict. Fish, frogs, turtles, mice, and rats housed in the department’s dedicated animal facility were loaded into vans and driven off to various pet stores around Nassau County that agreed to offer sanctuary.
The sweeping mandate was triggered by the public response to introducing a new physiology lab exercise designed by a recently hired faculty member. The new professor claimed the instructional activity was highly successful at their previous institution. It involved observing the effects of selected pharmaceuticals on the functioning of a four-chambered heart, and living
turtles were to be the containers of those hearts.
Specifically, the biology department purchased red-eared sliders with shells about six inches in length for the new lab exercise. They were housed in a water-filled aquarium in a clean, well-lit, 180-gallon tank in the dedicated animal room. Faculty and students could easily observe the swimming turtles from a hallway adjacent to the room. The reptiles were pretty and pleasurable to watch, swimming back and forth in the confines. Nevertheless, the lab’s clinical surroundings hung like a dark cloud over the serenity of the animal’s aquatic grace. According to the physiology laboratory manual, their fate was to be vivisected (dissected while alive) in the service of science education.
The biology department’s in-house-generated physiology lab manual clearly outlined instructions on exposing the beating heart of an anesthetized turtle. The methodology directed that a turtle be tied ventral side up onto a dissecting tray. A paper towel would then be placed over its head, which would most likely extend while the animal struggled to right itself. The anesthesia ether was to be dripped onto the paper towel until the reptile was rendered unconscious. Using an electric drill with a hole saw in its chuck, one of the collaborating team members (four students at a bench) would bore a circular opening through the animal’s plastron (bottom shell) to expose its beating heart. Students were then to carry out the laboratory manual’s prescribed chemical experiments on the open pericardial cavity. After completion, the turtle would be dispatched by increasing the anesthesia until the heart stopped, or if time was running out, just cut off the head.
The technical assistant (TA) responsible for caring for the turtles, while the reptiles unknowingly awaited their fate, perceived the live animal experiment as unnecessary cruelty. He shared his feelings privately with several department members, attempting to muster support to save the animals. The faculty was sympathetic to his feelings but defended the professor’s rights to use living animals in biology education, provided that they were rendered senseless before the procedure. As the scheduled date for the physiology lab rapidly approached, the frustrated TA took their charge of unnecessary cruelty off-campus. First, they solicited the support of a local herpetology club and then contacted the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a well-known Washington, D.C.-based organization. It was PETA that brought live animal experimentation, exercises, and demonstrations at NCC to a screeching halt.
The college administration received over five hundred letters protesting the intended “torturous” treatment of turtles in biology labs. PETA’s president threatened to picket the campus if the administration did not intervene to stop the practice. The local press further publicized the conflict, triggering an even greater community response (Topping, 1989). The controversial lab gained national attention when The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on it in its October 1990 issue.
The Biology Department’s Personnel and Budget Committee charged the TA with sidestepping the employment contract’s grievance procedure by taking the complaint off-campus rather than utilizing the contract’s recommended grievance procedure. In self-defense, the TA retained a lawyer to represent him, who subsequently retaliated by filing charges that his client’s free speech rights were being violated. A member of the college’s Board of Trustees openly sided with the TA’s complaints before the issue was brought to a board meeting. The college’s president quickly ended the building furor by decreeing that “all living vertebrate housing and experimentation on campus is immediately suspended.” Support animals and Homo sapiens were excluded from the ban, but not the male Siamese fighting fish in a bowl on the secretary’s desk. He had to go.
H. Newell Martin and the Isolated Heart Preparation: The Link Between the Frog and Open Heart Surgery
Henry Newell Martin, the founding professor of physiology at Johns Hopkins University, accomplished the significant leap from frog-heart experiments to sustained heart perfusion in mammals. In 1881, Martin introduced the first reliable isolated mammalian heart preparation, a breakthrough that Walter Meek later judged “possibly the greatest single contribution ever made from an American physiological laboratory” (Meek, 1928). An opinion echoed by John H. Gibbon, Jr., inventor of the heart-lung machine. He explicitly acknowledged Martin’s method as the essential bridge that made clinical cardiopulmonary bypass conceivable.
Poof! Laboratory Animals Instantly Turned Into Pets (or Pets’ Food)
The Biology department’s TAs were tasked with implementing the chief administrator’s directive. After a morning of negotiating with the owners of pet stores, hundreds of rats, mice, turtles, frogs, and fish were carried off in vans to begin their new provenance as pets-in-waiting or that “other” unmentioned possibility, being served up as dinner to a pet store’s more valuable carnivorous stock.
Four years before Nassau’s turtle incident, New York State Education Law was amended, requiring the establishment of an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) to oversee animal research protocols. The biology department was unaware of the change and did not have a committee in place. The College president ruled that his campus-wide ban would remain in effect until such a college-wide committee had been formed and officially approved of every instance for living vertebrates to return to campus. (An ongoing contract between the college and a licensed exterminator for controlling campus mice, rats, and pigeons was unaffected.)
A campus-wide IACUC was formed, comprising faculty members from several relevant departments, an administrator, a local community representative, and a veterinarian. Serving on a committee that needs to find common ground on an emotionally charged, quasi-religious topic can be stressful. From the summer of 1989 to the present, no non-human living vertebrate has been observed in a biology lab or classroom on NCC’s campus for instructional purposes. The department’s animal care facility, once known as “the mouse room,” has been converted into a Technical Assistants’ office and prep space.
Assorted Buttons Promoting Vertebrate Animal Protection
How to footnote this page. Reiser, Frank (2024) Dissecting Living Animals, https://antiqueslides.net/dissecting-living-vertebrate-animals/
References
Caruso, J. & Jason S (2017). Psychosurgery, Ethics, and Media: a history of Walter Freeman and the lobotomy, Journal of Neurosurgery, Vol 43 No. 3
Holmes, F. L. (1993). The Old Martyr of Science: The Frog in Experimental Physiology. Journal of the History of Biology
Helmholtz, H. (1845) Über den Stoffverbrauch bei der Muskelaktion. Arch Anat p. 74
Myers, Christopher (1990). PETA Assumes Controversial Role in National Battle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington D. C., Oct. 10
Topping, Robin. (1989). College Ends Turtle Experiments. Newsday. 6: