Asked about the healing of wounds in dogs, and the use of bandages, he answered: "I never bandage wounds. Many thousands of dogs have had operative wounds made on them, and have never been bandaged; and I have never bandaged an antiseptic surgical wound on a dog but once during the last six years, and that time I regretted it. I did it at the owner's request, and I regretted it. I do not always get a healing by first intention, but in by far the majority of cases I do. That means that I have no irritation there, and the dog has not licked his sutures out. The operations are done antiseptically, and the wound afterwards is dried properly, with ether and various things. Time is taken over all this and the wound is afterwards dressed with iodoform colloid, or some such preparation, in order to hermetically seal it from the exterior."

Asked whether the statement were true that extensive surgical wounds on the lower animals must necessarily be painful when the animal comes out of the anaesthesia, he answered: "My own experience is, that the statement is absolutely untrue. If my wound was painful, I should expect, from my knowledge of the dog, or even of the monkey-for I have also had experience of monkeys-that the animal would immediately go for those sutures and lick them out, or, at all events, lick the wound continually. That is evidence of irritation in the dog, but I do not find that as a rule. By far the greater majority of my wounds heal by primary union, and apparently without pain. The dog is simply put into a cage and given over to the nurse, until it is out of the chloroform; and when once it is out of the chloroform, it is simply put into a kennel like other dogs."

Asked about distemper, he answered that it would be impossible to investigate distemper without experiments on

dogs. To let a few dogs, comparatively, have distemper, whether given artificially or whether given naturally, would be a much better thing than to let hundreds of thousands die every year from this scourge, as they do at the present time.

Asked about anæsthesia for horses, he said that chloroform could safely be given to a horse.

Asked about the most humane method of destroying a pet animal, he said that prussic acid was the quickest, but in his opinion anesthesia was the most humane. Morphia required a very large dose to be fatal. He used morphia. largely, for stopping pain. He had seldom used chloral for dogs; and had not used urethane. He did not use ether much, because of the after-sickness in dogs. Asked further about morphia, he said that he used it for minor operations sometimes, but not for major operations. For a tracheotomy he would as a rule use cocaine. Personally, he did not think it would be easy to give a lethal dose of morphia to a dog. He had known a dog survive a dose of twenty grains of morphia; but the dog was absolutely dead to the world, and was unconscious to pain.

IX

ANÆSTHETICS USED IN EXPERIMENTS
ON ANIMALS

MR. G. D. THANE, LL.D., November 7, 14, 21, 1906 DR. THANE, Inspector for Great Britain under the Act since 1899, referring to the use of anaesthetics, said: "In my experience, anesthesia is practised in an experimental laboratory as a matter of routine-not in a disparaging sense, but as an essential part of the procedure, a matter of course. In fact, anæsthesia and asepsis are carried out in the laboratory, to the best of my knowledge and belief, as strictly as in the operating theatre of the hospital."

He was asked: "Is it your experience that dogs and monkeys are terrorised when they are taken out to be anaesthetised and operated upon?" He answered: "Not that dogs are. Monkeys are, of course, always very shy creatures they are very frightened, if you even go and look at them they often fly away-fly to the corner of the cage and knock about. Monkeys are very fearsome animals." He was quite sure that he had seen animals effectually kept under complete anesthesia for long periods of time; he was absolutely confident that the anesthesia was always complete. Asked about morphia used as an anaesthetic, he answered: "Morphia is very rarely used as an anæsthetic alone; that is quite certain. It can be ad

ministered so as to secure complete anesthesia-there is no question about it; but you probably would have to give a fatal dose." He pointed out to the Commission that a known proportion of anaesthetic vapour could be delivered per minute to an animal according to the weight of the animal, so as to ensure continuous and complete anæsthesia.

SIR JAMES RUSSELL, LL.D., November 7, 1906

Sir James Russell, Inspector for Scotland and the Northern Counties since 1890, was asked about the giving of anesthetics to animals. He said, speaking of recovery from anesthesia, "I have seen an animal drunk from the anæsthetic for an hour or two after an operation; and in another case, after a severe operation, I have seen the animal run about within an hour. I have mentioned one case in my précis, in which I came upon a licensee taking away part of the brain from a cat. After the operation was finished, and the wound dressed with collodion dressing, the animal was wrapped in flannel and put on the floor before the fire, to recover from the chloroform which had been given to it. I went round the rest of the premises, and came back again to the room where the operation was performed; and when I came back, I found the cat dressing its fur, and then I saw it walk across the room to a saucer of milk."

Asked about experiments under licence alone, he said: "Those experiments are mostly blood-pressures for testing the effects of drugs, with tubes attached to the arteries, and artificial respiration in some cases. Those are generally very prolonged from an hour, say, to three or four hours. I have watched one experiment myself, which lasted from a quarter to ten in the morning to half-past three in the afternoon, when I saw the animal killed. I always test

the anesthesia myself, by testing the reflexes. I do not think that the licensees would dare to do in a hospital what they do in laboratories in the way of giving anesthesia. I have frequently seen animals they have killed before beginning the operation, owing to pushing the anesthesia. too far. I saw one last week. I went into a laboratory where I found two licensees trying, by artificial respiration, to revive a monkey not yet touched with the knife: they had given it too much ether. Then they had to use another monkey, and I saw the experiment done on the second monkey from beginning to end, and even with it I thought they pushed the ether very far, though the monkey recovered, and I saw it two or three days after and it seemed all right. On several occasions I have found licensees with dead animals in their hands before they had begun experimenting, owing to overdosing with chloroform or ether."

The following questions were put and answered:

Q. You have spoken of your own observation of long and severe operations.-A. Yes.

Q. And you are quite satisfied that the animals had, at the least, a full dose of anaesthetics?-A. Yes; a very full dose.

Q. Do you know-perhaps you will leave it to some one else to answer-whether it is not a difficult matter in the case of a dog, for instance, to limit the exact amount which will kill and which will not kill: whether it is not a very difficult thing to keep a dog just on the border-line between life and death?-A. I would not say so. The result of my personal observation of experiments on dogs has been that they were very fully under; and I do not think they are so easily killed. I have no reason to believe that they are more easily killed than, say, rabbits, by overdosing with anaesthetics.