Experiments on Animals

Experiments on Animals is a medical work by Stephen Paget. Paget was an English surgeon and pro-vivisection campaigner. Excerpt: «As with the circulatory system, so with the nervous system, the work of Galen was centuries ahead of its time. Before him, Aristotle, who twice refers to experiments on animals, had observed the brain during life: for he says, „In no animal has the blood any feeling when it is touched, any more than the excretions; nor has the brain, or the marrow, any feeling, when it is touched“: but there is reason for believing that he neither recognised the purpose of the brain, nor understood the distribution of the nerves. Galen, by the help of the experimental method, founded the physiology of the nervous system.»