Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 115, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 May 1911 — SHOW BLOOD GERMS [ARTICLE]

SHOW BLOOD GERMS

Flashed on Screen to Illustrate Popular Lecture. 'i" Pictures Taken at Pasteur Institute and Brought to This Country to Illustrate Doctor Lee’s Address on Medicine. New York.—Weird objects wriggled over ther moving picture screen at the American Museum of Natural History a few nights ago, when Dr. Frederic S. Lee, professor of physiology in Columbia, showed his audiences how the germs of the sleeping sickness thrive amid the blood corpuscles. He also had pictures showing how the movement of a rabbit’s heart is studied, and a series illustrating how scientists inoculated monkeys with feVer germs in order to study the disease, a very similar process to the one which resulted in the recent discovery of a meningitis serum, he said. The last picture showed the simians restored to health and mischief. The pictures were taken at the Pasteur Institute and brought to this country to illustrate Doctor Lee’s address, whieh was the last of the Jesup lectures on scientific features of modern medicine, under the auspices of Columbia university. Pictures of the germs working among the blood corpuscles, and, apparently, feeding on them, were received with astonishment by .the audience. ’ - In speaking of his animal pictures, Doctor Lee, who is a leader in confuting the antlvivisectlonists, made tempered remarks concerning them. “In view of the great extension of the commendable humane movement ot the past half century,” said he, “it is, perhaps, not surprising that opposition to the use of animals for scientific purposes is hotly maintained by a few individuals., This opposition sometimes wilfully denies the value of animal experimentation in scientific advances; it sometimes assumes the extreme and ethically Indefensible attitude of denying the right of a man to use animals at all as experimental objects, and it has as Its practical aim the establishment of legal restrictions against the practice. These vary in degree from slight limitations to total prohibition. “The antlvfvißectlonlßt view is psychologically of great interest It rests on a low intellectual and ethical Jevel and bxhibits In an elemental simplicity the qualities and power of emotion. Its abnormal sympathy for animals blinds Its possessor to a normal sympathy for human beings. It assumes the present existence of cruelty In laboratories. As an evidence of such cruelty it either recites for the thousandth time one of a half-dozen classic Instances of experimental procedures that date from an early period, before the use of anaesthetics became general, or'lt misinterprets instances of modern procedure. Many antlrivisectionlsts are frequently sin cere, and undoubtedly undergo great mental anguish over the supposed unwarranted sufferings of animals. But thfey are fighting a monster that does not exist", The speaker said that one of the main causes of distrust of medicine and doctors, which, he said, had existed since ancient days and was still In force, was “the appalling Ignorance which people possess of their own bodies and bodily processes. “The ordinary man feels certain symptoms,” said the lecturer, "but he does not understand their real significance. He knows not whether they are Important or unimportant, or whether o.‘ not they demand a doc-

tor’s knowledge. He trusts blindly to the hope that if he neglects them they will pass away. If they persist, he diagnoses his own case and attempts to treat it. If, at last, he ft forced to appeal to the doctor, he learns that of the real significance of his disease he knows nothing, except what the doctor may tell him." After the lecture, it being the concluding one of a series, there was an Impromptu reception to Doctor Lee. Doctors and medical students, as well as lay members who were in the audience, greeted him. One woman told thq doctor she was seventy-four years old, but, in spite of that, had not one of his lectures.