From Vilification to Accommodation: Making a Common Cause Movement

Abstract

The history of the vivisection debate is a case study in the use of vilification not unlike its rhetorical use by adversaries in the pro-life/pro-choice controversy. According to Vanderford, vilification in that debate serves a number of functions: to identify adversaries as “them and us”; to cast opponents in an exclusively negative light; to attribute diabolical motives to one's adversaries; and to magnify the opposition's power as an enemy capable of doing great evil. In the vivisection debate, both sides have attempted to delegitimize each other by one or more of these means. On the antivivisection side, Samuel Johnson in 1758 produced the fiercest attack up to that time on “the inferior Professors of medical knowledge” and “race of wretches whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty.” When the antivivisectionist movement peaked in England in the 1870s, the animal experimentalists began to organize in earnest to fend off the charge that vivisection was both cruel and useless. By the turn of the century an American neurologist, Charles Loomis Dana, identified a way to discredit the mainly female antiscience “cranks” in the antivivisection movement by inventing the disease “zoophil-psychosis” to describe one of the diseases affecting mainly women who, having no children or a useful occupation, joined animal protection societies and campaigned against vivisection. Zoophil-psychosis, it was claimed, was a form of mental illness, an incurable insanity that afflicted the hysterical opponents of vivisection.