Is empathy innate? Are we all born with the ability to identify with the emotions of others, to feel someone else’s pain? Today’s media is chock full of stories about experiments in neuroscience and child psychology that seem to show that the emergence and growth of the ability to empathize is a natural part of human psychological development, present even in toddlers.
Yet human beings periodically commit terrible acts of cruelty and violence, and are often indifferent to suffering. What if the development of empathy is a precious and fragile cultural accomplishment, something that has developed in fits and starts over time, in certain historical moments, in certain places, among certain people? Maybe most people have the ability to empathize, but what if empathy is a set of practices and beliefs that have to be learned and cultivated in order for individuals to exercise it? Those practices and beliefs would, of necessity, only fully develop in a society that has come to place a high value on empathy, that formally and informally rewards empathic behavior and punishes cruelty and indifference, a society that devotes resources to teaching, rehearsing and developing methods of empathy.
How to Kill Animals Humanely is a relic of the history of empathy. English-speaking people originally used the terms “human” and “humane” interchangeably, merely to distinguish human beings from other “brute” animal species. Sometime in the early 18th century, “humane” began to have a special use: to denote a compassionate, caring attitude toward the suffering of other humans and animals, a profound sensitivity that was both a moral obligation and a psychological condition. The word “humane” increasingly came to be used in opposition to “inhumane,” a term that was applied to acts of cruelty to other living beings, and to the people who took pleasure in inflicting suffering or who were just callously indifferent. In the 19th century, “humane” societies were founded to “prevent cruelty,” first to animals (and later to children), first in Great Britain and then in the United States.
This pamphlet, a publication of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), is both a polemic against “needless cruelty” and a handy guide for those who are obliged to slaughter animals for food, medical research, or—in the case of injured or ailing animals—for purposes of euthanasia. “If you must kill them, do it without cruelty. Every animal has a right to justice and protection at the hands of the superior animal—man….” (This was very unlike contemporary antivivisectionism and vegetarianism, and later People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which absolutely opposed the slaughter of animals, and which criticized the very notion of human moral superiority.)Image List
The author, Dr. Daniel Denison Slade, was a socially prominent surgeon and veterinarian, founder of the Boston Veterinary Institute, professor of applied zoology at Harvard, director of the MSPCA, and a man of many other interests. Being a veterinarian of longstanding practice, Dr. Slade was an expert on animal slaughter. In his little pamphlet he considers how “the Jews,” Germans, French and Dutch do their killing, but in the end makes his own recommendations, supplemented by helpful illustrations. Ways to kill animals “in the most humane manner possible,” must vary according to the varying anatomical structure of different species: horses, cows, dogs, pigs, cats, poultry, Dr. Slade tells us. Even fish should be killed humanely. For most mammals, the creature should receive powerful blows to the head with a mallet— precisely where depends on the species and individual beast—stunning the animal into unconsciousness, and then finishing it off with more blows or a bullet or a blast from a shotgun. Slade also considers other techniques to lessen the suffering, even chloroform. But he warns against “pithing” a method “commonly in vogue,” in which the “spinal cord is severed or punctured between the first and second bones of the neck.” Such an approach, he worries, is “undoubtedly attended by more suffering than other methods.”
Although humane techniques of slaughter may require some practice to get right and a bit more work, Slade argues, they can also improve “the wholesomeness of meat for food, and the market value of the animal slaughtered; there being no question as to the effects of torture, cruelty and fear upon the secretions, and if upon the secretions, necessarily upon the flesh.” He finishes the pamphlet with a long listing of the mission and accomplishments of the MSPCA (including the provision to Boston police stations of “hammers and hoods for killing horses mercifully”), followed by the Society’s “thirty-nine articles of faith” and a fee schedule for membership.
Read other How To… features from the NLM Collections here.
Michael Sappol is a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine.
Historical Anatomy Museum
Please contribute to help preserve the historical traveling medical and anatomy museum know as Panoptikum - Grand Musée Anatomique.
The "panoptikum," a display where the exhibits surround the observer, is one of the oldest kinds of fairground attractions.
Be it a waxwork display, sideshow or a traveling museum - the panoptikum was not only entertainment but also had an educational aspect.
With today's fun-fairs, carnivals and amusement parks focused of the thrill aspects of mega-rides the classic fun-fair museum show has faded into the background and is now seldom seen .
Paradox Sideshows has resurrected the traditional traveling museum show with Panoptikum -Grand Musée Anatomique but needs help in restoring and preserving one of the last remaining inventories of an historical aanatomy and medical museum.
The approximately 200 exhibits - including medical wax models (known traditionally as moulage), medical and pathological specimens, anatomical curiosities and much more - from which the vast majority has an age of more than 80 years, are unique and rare.
In their restored and conserved status they are a historic artifacts of both the fairground and medical education.
It is all the more pleasing that these historical rarities be on public display and not - as various other pieces of this kind - in the basements of private collectors or buried in the archives of medical institutions.
In 2014 Paradox Sideshows began to again present some of these exhibits to the public at festivals and fairs.
The long-term preservation of the Panoptikum: Grand Musée Anatomique is in need of active support!
Although many of the museum exhibits are in an unusually good condition for their age there are many that need much more work for restoration and preservation. That the costly restoration can be achieved by museum admission fees alone seems unlikely..
For this reason we have decided to create fund-raising web-page, just as numerous cultural museums and companies have done, and offer the opportunity to provide financial support of a long-term existence of Panoptikum -Grand Musée Anatomique.
As important as supporting the traveling museum Panoptikum via "online crowd funding"is traditional "live crowd funding", that is to say, people visiting the museum at fairs and festivals during the season 2015 and beyond. Only in this way can this historical fairground exhibit be preserved for future generations.
The Panoptikum -Grand Musée Anatomique is presented by PARADOX SIDESHOW. As one of the last great sideshow companies in Europe, PARADOX SIDESHOW & MISTER MILLER'S SHOW preserves and presents the living tradition of classic fairground sideshows, variety entertainments and oddity exhibits.
Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a German-Jewish physician-author, was the first great exponent of the conceptual medical illustration—illustrations that go beyond the representation of human anatomy to visually explain processes that occur within the human body. His published works, aimed at a mass readership, contain thousands of imaginative images, produced by a cadre of talented commercial artists. In Kahn’s Das Leben des Menschen (5 vols., 1922–31), many of the illustrations copy the look of contemporary advertisement, with display type, subheadings, physically attractive models, etc. But they are not intended to sell a product: instead the human body, its structure and functions, are what’s advertised.
In Der Mensch Gesund und Krank (2 vols., 1939) the figures are mainly given a standard format that no longer permits headline-style display type within the frame of the illustration. This greater design consistency made for a more streamlined modern look. But Kahn never fully embraced consistency in presentation: he and his artists still eclectically borrowed from a variety of advertising design and illustration methods and subjects.That approach was not invented by Kahn and his artists. Anti-tuberculosis, pure food, sanitary cleanliness and anti-venereal disease campaigns before, during and after World War I, were already using techniques of advertising, with varying degrees of artfulness, in Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries. But in Kahn’s books lessons on anatomy, physiology, microbiology and pathology take center-stage without any directly instrumental purpose.
Take for example “The Sensory Organs of the Head,” which uses the encircled face of a beautiful woman to present a lesson on cellular physiology and the senses. The setting is the home (then accounted as “woman’s sphere”). Haloed by a circular band around her head, the female figure resembles a Hollywood starlet. Within the spotlight, her head is tilted back and lips parted slightly. The pose is ambivalent: Is she overwhelmed, frightened, on the edge of sexual arousal? None of these are particularly relevant to the lesson at hand, but all of them are relevant to the aims of the author and his artist, which is to get the reader to pay attention to the image. The illustration mimics contemporary movie posters, glamor magazines and cosmetics advertisements. The glamor girl is bombarded with the proliferating sensual experiences of modernity. The specialized sensory receptor cells seem to be shooting out along radiating dashed line-tracks launched from the technologies, commodities and experiences of everyday life. Heat is represented by a steam radiator; sound by a phonograph; light an electric lamp; cold a draft coming through an open window. The cells, like futuristic aliens or surrealistically distorted spermatozoa, seem to be attacking, pushing to penetrate the protective circle to gain access to the female subject and achieve “the reception of stimuli arising at a distance.”
Everything about “The Sensory Organs of the Head” tells the reader that we are in the modern world, but the aesthetic of the image comes entirely out of commercial advertising, and not modern art.
In other illustrations, especially in the 1930s, Kahn’s artists were influenced by modern art and modernist poster and magazine advertisement. There was a two-way traffic in images: pharmaceutical manufacturers were making illustrated ads that took up some of the same themes that Kahn featured—images showing stylized interior pathways of the respiratory and digestive systems. A few years after the publication of Kahn’s 1926 color poster “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (a collaboration with uncredited artist Fritz Schüler), Chemische Fabrik Promonta GmbH hired Kahn and Schüler to produce similar illustrations for advertisements for their pharmaceutical products.
The convergence of advertising illustration and fine art—the dynamic exchange of stylistic moves and aesthetic principles—is now so familiar to us, so pervasive, as to almost be invisible. We expect such things. But in the 1920s and ‘30s, this was something new and powerful, a way for Kahn, his artists, his readers—and commercial advertisers—to be modern and more modern still. Kahn’s images signify a condition of life and an aspiration: if humanity lived in the modern world of cars, machines, mass media, and proliferating advertisements, then such things were also inside of us. We are modern at the physiological core of embodied existence.
Michael Sappol is a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine. This blogpost is adapted from Michael Sappol’s new book, How to Get Modern with Scientific Illustration(forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2016)Image List
I'm a recent graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts pursuing a career in medical illustration. I wanted to share my thesis project with Morbid Anatomy since it is deeply influenced by my passionate study of anatomy, dissection, medical art history, and medical museums. Also because Morbid Anatomy was one of the first resources I looked at when I started to consider medical illustration. For my project I created an interactive anatomical flap mannequin that it is entirely hand drawn and life size.
The inspiration for this project came from my experience drawing from cadavers and viewing Johan Remmelin's anatomical fap book (1617) which I saw during my internship with Librarian, Annie Brogan, at the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mütter Museum.
