The History of Human-Animal Interaction - The Age Of Enlightenment And The Useof Vivisection

The centuries immediately following the Middle Ages are called the Age of Enlightenment because waves of intellectual and scientific advancement swept across Europe. Many superstitions and customs disappeared as societies became more urban and less rural. Church authorities began to lose much of their power over people's lives. Medical researchers gained permission to perform autopsies (mostly on executed prisoners) to learn about human anatomy. Autopsies had been forbidden by the church for centuries, and little medical progress had been made in the field of anatomy since the second century, when the Roman doctor Galen practiced dissection on gladiators and animals. Animal experimentation was to become a major research tool of modern medicine.

In 1543 the Belgian doctor Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) published "Some Observations on the Dissection of Living Animals" in De Fabrica Humani Corporis. Vesalius hoped to convince other doctors that the study of anatomy was essential to improving medical care. He advocated cutting open living animals to teach students about blood circulation.

During the 1600s the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) published some influential essays in which he argued that animals could not think at all. Descartes said that only humans had eternal souls; thus, only humans could reason. He described the human gift of language as proof that humans were philosophically different from animals. Descartes was fascinated with the field of mechanics and extended its ideas to nonhuman animals. He wrote that animals were mechanical things like clocks and therefore could not feel pain. This helped make it socially acceptable to cut open animals while they were still alive for medical and scientific purposes. The process became known as vivisection and was widespread in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Literature from this time describes live dogs being nailed to tables in classrooms and dissected to learn about their anatomy. Writers dismissed the cries of the dogs as being similar to the screeching sounds that a piece of machinery makes when it is forcibly taken apart.