Literary responses to animal experimentation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain

Abstract

The fact that British men of letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commented on the subject of animal experimentation is well known. Apart from anti-vivisectionists and modern advocates of animal rights, who have been keen to cite the most critical of these responses,' scholars have considered them in three main areas of research. In the history of ideas some of those literary sources have been used to elucidate the origins of animal protection and the development of man's relationship to the animal world.2 In the history of literature itself they have sometimes been helpful in analysing the interaction between the so-called "New Science", i.e. the science following Francis Bacon's programme of observation and experiment, and contemporary literature.3 And recently, in the history of medicine,