The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Law, Vivisection, and Animal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

The Bureaucracy of Empathy

Law, Vivisection, and Animal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Shira Shmuely

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

To my mother, Dalia Shmuely,

and in loving memory of my father,

Mordechai (Moti) Shmuely

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

The Legal and Scientific Landscapes of the Act

TWO

The Right Forms for the Job: Anesthesia, Brain Research, and Certificate E

THREE

The Prick of a Needle: The Challenges of Inoculation

FOUR

Regulating Pain in Laboratories: The Inspectorate

FIVE

Libel, Slander, and Vivisection

Conclusion: The Act in the Twentieth Century

Postscript: Can They Suffer?

Appendix I: British Cruelty to Animals Legislation and Case Law, Nineteenth Century

Appendix II: An Act to Amend the Law Relating to Cruelty to Animals, 1876

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I have always had a raw and intuitive interest in animals and the ways people around me treat them. I was perplexed by how moments of strong affection could turn into cold disregard, but I could not make sense of it. Shai Lavi’s seminar at Tel Aviv University about animals in law and jurisprudence—a real rarity in the 2000s—drew me into the then extremely small niche in the humanities in which I could explore these relationships. While enrolled in MIT’s doctoral program in History, Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), I was lucky to learn from Harriet Ritvo, one of the pioneers who made the niche into a thriving field. My greatest debt is to her dedicated mentorship. From beginning to end, a word would not have been written without her. Stefan Helmreich deserves ocean-deep gratitude for encouraging me to dare while always being in conversation with. Christopher Capozzola guided me to let the actors talk, and his intellectual enthusiasm revived me more than once.

Generous funds for this project were provided by the National Science Foundation, the Council for European Studies, the Center for International Studies at MIT, and the Kelly Douglas Fund at MIT. During the research, I came to admire the work of many librarians and archivists who have mastered and preserved the foundations of historical knowledge. Most of the collections I consulted are held by the British National Archives and the Wellcome Library, London. Other valuable materials are at the Royal College of Physicians, London, the library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the British Library, and the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University. Specifically, I am thankful to Michelle Baldwin from MIT libraries, who guided my first steps in this project.

I am thankful for the support of the History Department at MIT, especially Mabel Chin Sorett, Margo Collett, Lerna Ekmekçiog˘lu, Jeffery Ravel, Craig Wilder, and Elizabeth Wood. The HASTS program at MIT was my home even when I was away, and the stewardship of Karen Gardner was invaluable in all aspects. I deeply thank my teachers Jose Brunner, Natasha Dow Schull, Anita Guerrini, Sheila Jasanoff, David Jones, David Kaiser, Clapperton Mavhunga, Heather Paxson, Hanna Rose Shell, Susan Silbey, and Chris Walley. As a visiting researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center I benefited from the brilliant minds of Robin West and Gregory Class, who reconnected me with issues of the present.

Splendid friends provided their bright ideas to earlier drafts. They all made the craft joyful and memorable: Renee Blackburn, Marie Burks, Amah Edoh, Shreeharsh Kelkar, Nicole Labruto, Moran Levy, Lan Li, Daniel Mann, Liron Mor, Lucas Mueller, Oded Na’aman, Tamar Novik, Oded Rabinovitch, Joanna Radin, Caterina Scaramelli, Alma Steingart, Michelle Spektor, Maayan Sudai, Mitali Thakor, and Lihi Yona. I gained a lot from the genuine generosity of Canay Özden-Schilling, Tom Özden-Schilling, and Rebecca Woods.

During the years of working on this project, I touched life from both ends. I lost my father and gave birth to my children. This book is dedicated to my dad, who dreamt that I would be a scientist, and compromised with me writing about science, and to my admirable mother, who traveled the world to support my work. To my kids, Nitai, Mori, and Rafael—thank you for bringing the old awe and wonder of the animal kingdom back into my life. The Mann family was a significant anchor in the transatlantic water. None of my siblings—Naama, Hemdat, and Nadav—read a word that I wrote, yet their tribal love and cheerful humor kept me going. And above all, thank you, Itamar, a true believer.

Introduction

A well-dressed gentleman stands with his back to us, facing a small black dog, perhaps a terrier. The fingers of the man’s left hand are spread out as he leans on the desk on which the dog sits. His right hand is behind his back, gripping a glass bottle. He is positioned so that only we, the viewers, can see the small container. Next to the dog lies an assortment of surgical instruments, and behind him is a microscope. The dog cannot see what the man has behind his back, but his expression betrays anxiety as he puts his paws together in submission, almost begging. His fate is as clear as the liquid in the bottle. The caption of the engraving in its 1885 London exhibition was Vivisection—The Last Plea (Figure 1). The engraving visualizes the practice of animal experimentation following the British Cruelty to Animals Act (1876). Among other provisions, the Act, also known as the Vivisection Act, outlawed public demonstrations of experiments and obliged experimenters to hold a license and practice in registered places.¹ The new order set by the Act, which required the use of anesthesia, is represented by the small bottle held by the experimenter in the engraving. Under the authority of the Home Office, the 1876 Act was in force for more than a century and inspired similar legislation in other countries.

The Vivisection Act created a comprehensive administrative system to govern, in the words of Section 2, any experiment calculated to give pain to a living animal. No pain—no law. After 1876, if a British physiologist planned an experiment that would cause pain to the animals being used, a whole set of guidelines came into play. The physiologist, almost always a man in that period, would have to submit a license application to the Home Office. Depending on the intended procedure, he might also have to submit a special certificate signed by two leading medical figures. The law-abiding physiologist would register his laboratory at the Home Office, thereby putting an end to weekend experiments in his home basement. While running the experiment, he would be required, among other things, to use anesthesia and kill the animals before their recovery from its effects (a Home Office inspector might walk into the laboratory without prior notice). Upon concluding the experiment, the physiologist’s assistants would record the details of the procedure in anticipation of a future inspection by the Home Office.

Figure 1 / A Dog on a Laboratory Bench Sits Up and Begs the Prospective Vivisector for Mercy. Engraving by C. J. Tomkins, 1883, after a painting by J. McClure Hamilton. Wellcome Collection, 25933i.

However, the same post-1876 British physiologist did not need to notify the Home Office if his planned experiments were regarded painless. He could then go ahead with his research routine in his university laboratory or home basement, undisturbed by the Act and its administration in all its tedious forms. The definition of pain was, therefore, crucial for determining one’s research strategies and their legality, as much as it was essential for designating the responsibilities of the Home Office under the Vivisection Act.

But what was pain? Having a certain idea of pain, a way to detect it, measure it, and talk about it, were fundamental for anyone engaged with the Vivisection Act, be the person a scientist, a civil servant, or an animal lover watching over the implementation of the Act. Nevertheless, the Act did not define pain, just as it did not define experiment, and left it for bureaucrats, scientists, antivivisectionists, and jurists to debate. Their exchanges, negotiations, and formulations of pain make up the case studies in this book. The period under inquiry starts with the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection, which recommended the enactment of the law. The narrative ends three decades later, with the report of the second Royal Commission on Vivisection (1906–12), which concluded three formative decades of developing the implementation policy of the Home Office.

In discussing the significance of the Vivisection Act, I make three core arguments. First, the Act molded ideas of moral conduct in animal experimentation into a set of legal provisions, which infiltrated almost every aspect of the physiology profession and shaped experimental medicine for a century. When civil servants guided experimenters in modifying their practices in accordance with the regulations for the prevention of cruelty to animals, they intertwined practical and normative aspects of animal research. Late nineteenth-century law was inseparable from physiology, and normative order played a crucial role in the production of scientific facts in biomedical research. The Act became one of the factors that defined and shaped experiments. If experimentation produced scientific facts, regulated animal experimentation produced scientific facts with the additional administrative assurance that the knowledge embodied in the published facts had been obtained by morally acceptable means. Seeing the extent of state intervention in physiologists’ methods, be it through the requirement to fill out forms or the obligation to put down a suffering animal, is essential not only for our understanding of the broad reach of law but also for a clearer view of the structure of modern biomedical science.²

Second, as much as the history of animal experimentation regulation is that of the incorporation of legal norms into the life sciences, it is also a story about science affecting legal concepts and practices. Scientific claims about physiological phenomena directed British regulators when drafting the Act, and informed civil servants when creating policies and conducting routine enforcement. Late nineteenth-century scientific ideas of pain, although in constant flux, framed the ways legislators, civil servants, and lawyers understood sentience and responded to sentient animal bodies. Anesthesia, for example, was adopted as a dominant tool of the law. Furthermore, while legal representatives pronounced their ideas about animal pain, men of science provided their legal interpretation of the Act. Scientific theories and ethical norms were circulating between the worlds of law and science.

Third, the Act imposed a utilitarian relationship with experimental animals. While it traded nonhuman animals’ agonies for scientific progress, it also mandated a relation of care and attention to the pain of these creatures. Moreover, the definition of pain as the prism through which the use of animals was evaluated generated a process of empathy. Contrary to the prevailing view in the history of laboratories and animal studies, animals in regulated research environments did not become yet another item in a set of artifacts.³ With the Vivisection Act in force, almost any engagement with research animals led those involved to evaluate the sensory experiences of the animal subjects through a variety of cognitive and emotional processes. The Home Office administration attempted to mold these processes into bureaucratic forms and generalized guidelines.

To elucidate the dynamic between law and science as it played out in the regulation of vivisection, I introduce two theoretical concepts: bureaucracy of empathy and the coproduction of science and normative order.

The Act established a bureaucracy of empathy. Bureaucracy here stands for its plainest definition as a system of government or … administration by a hierarchy of professional administrators following clearly defined procedures in a routine and organized manner.⁴ Home Office bureaucracy encompasses the procedures, routines, and ideas that were instituted following legislation to implement the overarching principle of managing the pain of animals in laboratories. Empathy stands for feeling what one imagines the other feels or should feel. In the context of the Act, it is the scientist’s or bureaucrat’s ability to identify with nonhuman animals and to evaluate their sensory experiences. The actors at the time, it should be noted, did not use the term.

The legal scholar Robin West draws from Adam Smith when she explains, Empathy tells us, perhaps, something about what others are feeling, or at least gives us a hint of its feel. It is a source of information. Empathy allows the empathizer access to a certain kind of knowledge—knowledge of the perspective of others.⁵ I do not contrast empathy with anatomical and physiological knowledge; to the contrary, the latter was at times integral to the empathizing process. Science was not an objective alternative to empathy, and knowledge sometimes informed attempts to empathize with the animal. It is important to note that this definition of empathy is devoid of moral overtones. Empathy, suggests the philosopher Stephen Darwall, can be consistent with the indifference of pure observation or even the cruelty of sadism. It all depends on why one is interested in the other’s perspective.⁶ Empathy can thus be factored into the rational, calculative processing of other creatures’ pain with no contradiction in terms. This point becomes clearer when empathy is contrasted with sympathy, which implies a positive and supportive affinity with another being. Again I follow West, who explains that sympathy is the moral sentiment that aligns our interest with that of another in pain … Empathy is not what motivates action. Sympathy is what motivates action. Or, in the words of the historian Rob Boddice, sympathy is an emotional recognition of the plight of the object in question … the actions done in the name of sympathy are, or are supposed to be, good.⁷

The understanding of empathy as a source of knowledge differs from the definition employed by the philosopher and animal studies scholar Lori Gruen, who distinguishes empathy and sympathy in terms of connection. For Gruen, sympathy involves maintaining one’s own attitudes and adding to them a concern for another. It is a response to something bad, untoward, unfortunate, or unpleasant happening to someone else in which the individual sympathizing retains all of her attitudes, beliefs, feelings, etc. Empathy, by contrast, recognizes connection with and understanding of the circumstances of the other, an attunement to the well-being of another.⁸ Empathizing with nonhuman animals, according to Gruen, involves immersion in their suffering and perspective. My research has shown that late nineteenth-century British administrators and scientists empathized with animals not to connect but to adjust their use in accordance with the ethical roadmap of the Act.

The second theoretical concept that underlies this book is the coproduction of science and normative order. Starting in the 1980s, historians of science have been preoccupied with investigating the social construction of scientific facts. They have joined other scholars under the aegis of the multidisciplinary field of science and technology studies (or science, technology, and society, both abbreviated STS) to inquire how statements about nature are being made. STS scholars strive to untangle every knot in the knowledge-making process. This literature asks, among other things, what the objects of scientific inquiry are, how research spaces are defined, who is involved in the experimental process and who is left out, what role is played by tools in empirical research, how experiments are designed, and when they end. STS literature also examines the products of scientific inquiries, looking at how knowledge is generalized and universalized, how scientific information comes to be trusted, when it fails to be accepted by specific communities or the broader public, and so forth.⁹ The scientific fact was hitherto shown to be an assemblage of elements such as actors, funds, devices, witnessing practices, recording and publication standards, and translation techniques. A close look at the history of vivisection reveals that another substantial factor in the production of facts in the life sciences, and perhaps also in other scientific disciplines, is normative values or ethics.

STS scholarship shows that scientific apparatuses not only create facts but also organize social relations. These are the workings of coproduction, defined by the STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff as the simultaneous production of knowledge and public order.¹⁰ Existing STS literature examines public order mainly in the sense of how citizenship is practiced and how state institutions and civil organizations are formed; current literature on coproduction is mostly dedicated to questions of science and democratic politics, and focuses on issues of risk, representation, and allocation of resources.¹¹ At the same time, the intervention of the state in scientific practice in the name of moral values reveals the normative dimension of law and the ethical aspect of regulation.¹²

Beyond showing that law affected scientific practice and reasoning and that scientists, in turn, influenced administrative and legal decisions regarding the Act, this book describes the ways in which scientists and state bureaucrats were involved in the coproduction of knowledge and normative order. Ensembles of scientists, members of parliament, civil servants, and law officers debated to define the type and intensity of pain that the law focused on, as well as how it was to be recognized. The coproduction by law and science of a definition of pain also involved redefining and redesigning physiological experiments, demonstrating that the interaction between law and science ends up recreating the world, not only materially but also culturally and morally.¹³ To paraphrase the historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, this book shows that solutions to the problem of knowledge were embedded within practical solutions to the problem of normative order, and practical solutions to the problem of ethics encapsulated practical solutions to the problem of knowledge.¹⁴

The role of law in this history is not that of an arbitrator between contesting scientific views.¹⁵ Representatives of the law did not have the final say in the disputes surrounding the implementation of the Act. For instance, the magistrate that decided in an 1881 case against a distinguished neurologist, or the General Solicitors’ opinions regarding the classification of inoculation procedures, never ended the debates about the meaning of pain or experiment. Legal and research spaces became ad hoc trading zones, to borrow the historian of science Peter Galison’s terminology, where the different cultures of epistemology and reasoning cultivated by law and science came to terms with each other over the questions of pain and experiments.¹⁶ Courtrooms as well as animal shelters at the laboratories were trading zones where physiologists and bureaucrats disputed (and sometimes agreed on) the definitions of pain and experiment while simultaneously informing one another about normative values and knowledge concerning animal bodies. The jointly shaped concepts and practices would dominate the regulation of animal experimentation for a century.

This book historicizes the philosophical conundrums of what is pain and how one knows about others’ pain, and examines how British scientists and bureaucrats at the turn of the twentieth century, who were tasked with reflecting upon the inner experiences of nonhuman animals, approached this epistemological, administrative, and physiological challenge. Pain and pleasure were prominent concepts in modern English moral thought. Jeremy Bentham, the emblematic utilitarianist thinker, joined a long tradition originating in Greek philosophy that founded moral principles on pain and pleasure.¹⁷ Educated Victorians were familiar with these ancient texts, as classical training in secondary school was a prerequisite for admission to university.¹⁸ However, the historian of ancient Western philosophy Richard Sorabji notes that in antiquity, the debate about animal ethics centered on the rationality of animals, or lack thereof. Only rarely, and relatively late, did the Greek philosophers mention pain as a reason for treating animals well.¹⁹ Once pain was established as a central element in eighteenth-century moral thought regarding animals, it remained for scholars and scientists to define it, measure it, and fit it into the utilitarian calculus.

Was pain transmissible at all? The literary scholar Elaine Scarry portrays (human) pain as a private experience, before and beyond verbal expression, inherently untransmittable.²⁰ The historian Joanne Bourke opposes Scarry’s interpretation, claiming that pain, as a type of event, is infinitely sharable through imagination and identification.²¹ It is at once an existentially absorbing experience, a social matter that generates solidarity, and a racialized and gendered object of governance that is to be located, treated, or manipulated.²²

Medical organizations today bring into the definition of pain its subjective experience as well as its objective indicators. The latest definition by the International Association for the Study of Pain is: An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.²³ However, the association complicates this by stating that neither the physiological nor the demonstrative element of the definition is obligatory: Pain and nociception are different phenomena. Pain cannot be inferred solely from activity in sensory neurons, and verbal description is only one of several behaviors to express pain; inability to communicate does not negate the possibility that a human or a nonhuman animal experiences pain. Two centuries of systematic scientific study of pain led researchers to incorporate its intractability into its definition: other creatures’ pain cannot be inferred only by the activity of their sensory neurons, but it is also not necessarily communicable.²⁴

When pain is examined in an administrative context, the aspect of its transmissibility is refined. Victorian vivisection law presumed that animal pain could be traced and identified, and it entrusted civil servants and physiologists with the task of hunting it down. The archives show that the efforts to imagine and understand animal pain provided local and temporary solutions to the problem of pain while repeatedly failing to provide a conclusive medico-legal paradigm for its elimination.

The notion that animals could feel pain was not a nineteenth-century discovery. Indeed, René Descartes famously analogized animals to machines, and their agonized cries to the sound of a broken clock. But the prevalent belief that the Cartesian view represented common seventeenth-century wisdom, and that it was this wisdom that laid the philosophical foundation for animal experimentation, was, according to the historian Anita Guerrini, simply not true.²⁵ The majority of the French Academy of Sciences ignored the beast-machine theory, and most anatomists believed that animals could feel pain although they lacked a rational soul.²⁶ Animal pain had thus been acknowledged before, but what was unique about nineteenth-century Britain was the introduction of new theories about the physiological mechanisms of sensation, and the elevation of pain into a central moral criterion in light of which human−animal relations were to be formed.

Following the publication of Harriet Ritvo’s 1987 Animal Estate, which treated human−animal relations as a subject worthy of focused historical inquiry, the British context became a favorite choice for investigating the shifting relations between humans and other animals.²⁷ This is, among other reasons, because in British society the move from disinterest in animals’ fate to a national concern was radical and evident. The rising sentiments toward animals were influenced by changes in living conditions and were nourished by a complex set of ideas about nature, social order, religion, and nationality. The historian Keith Thomas interprets the increased concern for animals as part of an ongoing reconfiguration of nature in British culture. Thomas attributes the change to the destruction of the old anthropocentric illusion with the expansion of knowledge about the world.²⁸ Another factor was the accelerated urbanization that separated city dwellers from their rural past. Care for animals offered a measure of reconciliation with this rupture.²⁹

The growing sentiments toward nonhuman animals in Britain have been well documented by now, and extensive explanations have been offered for this phenomenon. Equally well researched is the massive increase in the use of animals in modernity, especially in the agricultural sector, which responded to a growing demand for meat.³⁰ Perhaps second to agriculture in animal use, is the medical sector. As the historian Abigail Woods maintains, Different roles have provided animals with different opportunities to shape medicine, with ramifications for the health of both humans and animals. The concept of the animal role therefore offers a useful tool for illuminating the historical co-constitution of humans, animals and medicine.³¹ My contribution to this literature is in exploring the nexus of animal use and animal ethics. I take the Vivisection Act as the starting point for this inquiry, when the central issue of contention was no longer whether to regulate vivisection, but in what way. The leading question here would be how (rather than why) the humanitarian mindset was translated into codes of behavior in a field of science that was increasingly reliant upon animal use.³²

This line of inquiry reflects a scholarly interest in the history of Victorian administration. Debates over the degree and nature of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain go back to A. V. Dicey’s influential 1905 essay Law and Public Opinion in England.³³ Dicey’s arguments, and in particular his claim that the mid-nineteenth century was an era of thriving individualism, were challenged by succeeding analysts.³⁴ One strand in the debate over the history of British governance centered on the attempt to understand the forces that initiated legislative changes. Reacting to Dicey’s emphasis on theories and political ideals, Oliver MacDonagh suggested a model for government growth based on the dynamic between bureaucrats and the public.³⁵ Subsequent publications focused on the nuts and bolts of nineteenth-century administrative apparatuses, encompassing a wide range of fields and activities such as factories, schools, explosives production, and nature conservation.³⁶

However, the Vivisection Act was given little attention by those examining the growth of governance in nineteenth-century Britain. There are several possible reasons for this omission. In particular, the Act differed from other legislation in that it did not express a direct concern with public safety or economic interests; instead, it focused on the welfare of animals. Individual rights were not a factor in the debates about state intervention in animal experimentation, and the main objection of opponents of the legislation concerned the regulation hindering the advancement of medicine as a common good.³⁷ In addition, the administrative body charged with implementing the Act was markedly smaller than some of the other inspectorates; for the larger part of its first three decades, it comprised only three inspectors—one responsible for England, one for Scotland, and one for Ireland.³⁸ Nevertheless, the Act played a critical role in shaping British medical science and, more than other Home Office inspectorates, it provides a fruitful case study of nineteenth-century state intervention in scientific research.

Bureaucratic records not only testify to the scope of control of Victorian governance over the medical professions but also are useful for researching the history of affects and emotions. Home Office records of the Vivisection Act demonstrate what happens when care for nonhuman animals is regulated, and empathy becomes a legal demand. As the historian Janet Browne explains, since the only things available to historians are the representations of feelings, research is turning towards the places and ‘performances’ sites of these representations.³⁹ Historians have examined Victorian experimenters’ attempts at overcoming or redirecting their emotions toward the animals they vivisected.⁴⁰ In general, emotions of any sort—of human experimenters and nonhuman experimental subjects—were seen by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists as something to be curbed or locked out of the physiological laboratory.⁴¹ Gendered constraints on the entrance of women to the laboratory were added to other markers of gentlemanly dominion, such as emotional detachment, to construct the experimental space as an emotion-free men’s club.⁴² However, experimenters strategically acknowledged their feeling of care toward animals when confronted with accusations of acquired emotional apathy by antivivisectionists. Tenderness toward their animal subjects was seen as acceptable and was even valued as a marker of the physiologists’ refined character, but only when the emotions were moderate. At the same time as insisting that they were compassionate to animals, physiologists ridiculed their opponents’ excessive sensitivity and feminine qualities.⁴³

This book is about people and their efforts to comprehend the animals they used for biomedical research, and it does not attempt to avoid the anthropocentric perspective.⁴⁴ To the contrary, I delve into the anthropocentric logic at the heart of the Vivisection Act and examine how two of Western society’s most celebrated institutions, law and science, coproduced knowledge about, and ethical obligations toward, nonhuman animals in late nineteenth-century Britain. Only rarely, and through the perspective of human actors, do the Vivisection Act archives reveal something about the life and suffering of nonhuman animals in British laboratories.

Feminist theorists in particular consider biology to be political discourse, the product of historical circumstances and social values, where animals are bearers of myriad cultural meanings. These scholars also carefully attend to the concrete trajectories that turned nonhuman creatures into subjects of research and emblems of values.⁴⁵ The challenge of accounting for the life experiences of actual animals poses a dilemma for animal studies scholars. While some struggle to produce such accounts, other voices are skeptical as to the viability of this project, given the limitations of man-made archives.⁴⁶ The historian Ian Miller warns that giving thoughtful agency to animals would be a disservice since it would invariably be an act of dominance, no matter how well intentioned.⁴⁷ Sharing this reluctance, Harriet Ritvo contemplates that it might be more respectful to acknowledge [nonhuman animals’] inscrutability.⁴⁸ In what follows, this inscrutability of animals will be contrasted with the efforts of scientists and bureaucrats to know more about animal bodies. The administrative and scientific records will randomly provide evidence about individual creatures: a female dog who lived with her litter in a laboratory, a monkey who liked sitting in front of a fire, or an old photo of the ears of a hare. But more than anything, these records tell us something about the people who authored them.

The laboratory animal was the offspring of the conjunction of law and science. It was, in the words of the historian Paul White, another kind of animal, whose emergence is linked to the advent of biology and physiology as professional disciplines and the rise of the laboratory as the site of knowledge production in the life sciences.⁴⁹ One of the earliest uses of the term laboratory animal appeared in an 1876 Nature report about the newly enacted British statute.⁵⁰ The term joined the existing experimental animal, and was increasingly disseminated toward the turn of the twentieth century, only to be replaced by the contemporary model animal or model organism.⁵¹

The Act joined physiological research in rendering animals into laboratory tools.⁵² For example, nineteenth-century vivisectors chose to experiment on specific organisms over others for a variety of reasons, including availability, cost, quick payoff, the theory with which an organism was associated, and symbolic value.⁵³ The Act helped to shape these preferences by requiring special certificates for using dogs, cats, and some other selected species, among other requirements. In 1893, for example, the Home Office suspended the physiologist William Findlay’s certificate to experiment on dogs and instructed him to experiment first on rodents.⁵⁴ The mandatory use of anesthesia in experiments, the standards of animal housing, and the reports scientists were asked to submit to the Home Office are only a few of the ways in which the law actively shaped the practices that produced the laboratory animal.

Focused on the administration of the Vivisection Act, my analysis draws extensively on the abundant Home Office memos and letters meticulously filed at the National Archives in Kew, England. I examine internal reports and memorandums composed by Home Office officials at all levels—inspectors, undersecretaries, and Home Secretaries, who were often personally involved in the Act. I make wide use of outgoing letters from the Home Office to scientists and other parties that were relevant to the implementation of the Act. The files