Note 125 — XIV. GASSENDI. 1592–1655.

Advancement of Learning, iv., 2. Bacon’s suggestion seems to imply that human beings were still vivisected, for the “good” of science, in his time. Celsus, the well-known Latin physician of the second century, had protested against this cold-blooded barbarity of deliberately cutting up a living human body. The wretched victims of the vivisecting knife were, it seems, slaves, criminals, and captives, who were handed over by the authorities to the physiological “laboratory.” Harvey, Bacon’s contemporary, is notorious (and, it ought to be added, infamous) for the number and the unrelenting severity of his experiments upon the non-human slaves, which, though constantly alleged by modern vivisectors to have been the means by which he discovered the “circulation of the blood,” have been clearly proved to have served merely as demonstrations in physiology to his pupils. But we no longer wonder at Harvey’s indifference to the horrible suffering of which he was the cause, when we read the similar atrocities of vivisection and “pathology” of our own time. From the cold-blooded cruelties of Harvey, who was accustomed to amuse Charles I. and his family with his demonstrations, it is a pleasant relief to turn to the better feeling of Shakspere on that subject. See his Cymbeline (i., 6), where the Queen, who is experimenting in poisons, tells her physician,

and is reminded that she would “from this practice but make hard her heart.” Such a rebuke is in keeping with the true feeling which inspired the poet to picture the undeserved pangs of the hunted Deer in As You Like It, ii., 1.