Chapter 3 - Textual Strategies

Summary

Chapter 3 examines scientific accounts of laboratory experiments and outlines antivivisectionist responses to them. By closely scrutinising physiological texts to reveal the ‘real’ experimenter, antivivisectionists produced a language of textual dissection that became problematically allied with laboratory operations and threatened to undermine the movement’s binary rhetoric of ‘Art vs. Science’. Vivisectors and their opponents shared a rhetoric of intense and absorbing concentration, bodily excision and displacement, and triumphant discovery. The chapter then considers three Victorian novels which creatively adapted the reading strategies advanced by antivivisectionist leaders such as Frances Power Cobbe. Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), Edward Berdoe’s St Bernard’s (1887), and Walter Hadwen’s Dr Deguerre (1913–18) proffer supplementary texts including real and fictional pamphlets, newspaper articles, and medical papers. These ancillary materials present alternatives to surgical intervention; they reveal diagnostic information and promote alternative holistic approaches to health which catalyse the fictional vivisector’s demise.