§ MR. G. GREENWOOD (Peterborough)I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if his attention has been drawn to the Return showing the number of experiments performed on living animals during the year 1904, under licences granted under the Act 39 and 40 Vic, c. 77, distinguishing painless from painful experiments; whether the sixteen experiments performed by Dr. William Bain, and recorded in the Return, in some of which septic bacilli were introduced into the interior of the gall bladders of dogs through wounds two or three inches long, made for that purpose, and in all of which one or more gall stones were also inserted into the living dogs gall bladders, and left there for periods varying from fourteen, to seventy days, and in thirteen of which a post-mortem examination proved that the gall bladders were inflamed at the time of death, should not properly have been distinguished as painful; and whether the operations described by Dr. Bain as involving the insertion of septic bacilli into wounds in dogs made by himself for that purpose are properly reported in such Return as asceptic operations.
§ * MR. GLADSTONEThe Answer to the first part of the hon. Member's Question is in the affirmative. I am advised that the Answer to the second part is that the experiments could not properly be described as painful. Those 923 of the animals which the inspector saw gave no indication of pain, and the operator declares that he did not believe that the animals suffered any pain. The symptoms observed in a post-mortem examination did not indicate suffering. As to the third part of the Question I am advised that, as the actual operation was performed under aseptic conditions, it is properly described as aseptic.