Page:Pioneer work in opening the medical profession to women - autobiographical sketches (IA b28145227).pdf/162

This page needs to be proofread.

his supposition be true. He also spoke of the power which the liver has of secreting sugar in a normal state, when animals are fed on certain substances which can be so converted; also of the curious experiment by which a dog was made, in his presence, to secrete albuminous or diabetic urine, according to the pricking of one or another point of the pneumogastric nerve near its origin. . . .^[1]

At the afternoon visit we had quite a philosophical discussion on society, &c. Mlle. Mallet was delighted with a bon mot of M. Blot. She remarked that she understood that les demoiselles had answered like anges. 'Yes,' he answered, 'en ôtant le g.' They had been unusually stupid! She asked me if M. Blot were not rather moqueur. I said I did not know, but that I had discovered that he was very ambitious. His sentiments seem to be good, but his character is certainly not French.

September 21.—M. Dubois stopped to speak to me after the lecture, and again expressed his great desire that I should remain a year in the institution. I told him I had determined to remain another three months; but I had many other branches to study. He replied that anything else I might learn elsewhere as well as in

↑ I was at that time utterly unaware of the amount of degrading cruelty perpetrated by many foreign investigators upon helpless animals under methods erroneously called scientific. It required the extended observation of the physician to realise the intellectual fallacy necessarily involved in experiments which destroy the thing to be observed; and also to recognise how the constant promulgation of false theory and practice arising from erroneous methods of investigation hinders the attainment of scientific medicine. I have long since realised that conscience and humanity must guide intellectual activity and curiosity, or we wander from the high-*road of truth into a labyrinth of error. The above experience illustrates how the eager young student, thirsting for knowledge, may be blind to the unscientific or immoral methods of pseudo-science.

[1] I was at that time utterly unaware of the amount of degrading cruelty perpetrated by many foreign investigators upon helpless animals under methods erroneously called scientific. It required the extended observation of the physician to realise the intellectual fallacy necessarily involved in experiments which destroy the thing to be observed; and also to recognise how the constant promulgation of false theory and practice arising from erroneous methods of investigation hinders the attainment of scientific medicine. I have long since realised that conscience and humanity must guide intellectual activity and curiosity, or we wander from the high-*road of truth into a labyrinth of error. The above experience illustrates how the eager young student, thirsting for knowledge, may be blind to the unscientific or immoral methods of pseudo-science.

[1]