DR. ELIOT AT ETHER DAY

President Emerltus Eliot was the principal speaker on Saturday at the annual celebration of "Ether Day" by the alumni of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Eliot spoke in part as follows:

"The first demonstration of surgical anacstbesia, which took place in this hospital on October 16, 1846, was the great event which we celebrate today. From this building the blessed art spread rapidly over the civilized world, the most beneficent gift which chemical and medical science has conferred on mankind."

Dr. Eliot cited the various uses to which ether is put at the present day, and mentioned the discovery of antiseptics seventeen years after that of ether. He then spoke on animal experimentation by vivisection, and gave the resulting benefits to mankind as adequate justification for these experiments. He took as an example the result of the very first discovery, that of substituting vaccination for innoculation in cases of small-pox.

Dr. Eliot closed by taking up the question of whether it is commendable to make these invaluable and scientific discoveries at the expense of the comfort or life of animals, which man uses in various ways to sustain himself. Dr. Eliot defended the tests on animals in these words:

"The civilized world has come to believe in the freedom of inquiry in all fields, as the best means of progress in knowledge, in manners and in righteous living. Now the field of inquiry from which within the last 60 years mankind has received the largest visible, tangible, concrete, demonstrable benefits is in the field of medical research applied in the medical and surgical art and in sanitary science. If freedom of inquiry be in general expedient and righteous, should not inquiry be free in this most productive of all fields? To secure and maintain this freedom against the assaults of ignorance and misdirected sentimentality it is only necessary that the public should know what medical research has done and is likely to do."