Life, 1915-05-13 · page 15 of 52
Life — May 13, 1915 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes opposition to anti-vivisection legislation in Massachusetts. Dr. William Cannon of Harvard opposed a bill restricting animal experimentation, arguing that dogs were necessary because smaller animals and expensive monkeys wouldn't yield comparable results. The cartoon's brutal satire imagines a baseball stadium filled with orphans instead of spectators—visualizing the author's (E.O.J.'s) scathing reductio ad absurdum argument: if cost and organ similarity are the only ethical considerations, why not experiment on orphans instead of animals? They're "free" and have "no friends." The piece mercilessly exposes the logical callousness of privileging expense over suffering. By depicting orphans as replacements for animal test subjects in a crowded stadium, it condemns both the vivisection practice and the cold utilitarian reasoning used to justify it. The satire works by taking Cannon's economic argument to its horrifying conclusion.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
IF DREAMS CAME TRUE A Matter of Expense N Massachusetts recently they have been trying to take the dog out of the clutches of the vivisector. Dr. Cannon, professor of physiology at Harvard, was one of those who opposed the bill which was introduced in the Legislature for that purpose. He said that the rabbit and other smaller inferior animals have organs so fine that experiments do not bring the same results as do those on dogs, while the monkey is too expensive for ordinary experiments, No room for sentiment there. If, therefore, expense is the most important thing to be considered, why not use orphans? Orphans have no friends and can he had for almost nothing. And, of course, their organs are right. Undoubtedly orphans should yield a greater amount of useless information per thousand units of agony than any other living creature. E.O. J. comicbooks.com