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The Doctor's Dilemma (4); Getting Married, and the Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet
The Doctor's Dilemma Getting Married and the Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet - 4 Author:Bernard Shaw Volume: 4 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1911 Original Publisher: Brentano's Subjects: Drama / General Drama / American Drama / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Drama / Shakespeare Literary Criticism / Drama Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the or... more »iginal. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Suggested Laboratory Tests of the Vivisector's Emotions Take the hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice, ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain rather less than the nearest dentist could have told him, and who boasted of the ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which he carried out his experiments. Or the gentleman who starved sixty dogs to death to establish the fact that a dog deprived of food gets progressively lighter and weaker, becoming remarkably emaciated, and finally dying: an undoubted truth, but as- certainable without laboratory experiments by a simple enquiry addressed to the nearest policeman, or, failing him, to any sane person in Europe. The Italian is diagnosed as a cruel voluptuary: the dog-starver is passed over as such a hopeless fool that it is impossible to take any interest in him. Why not test the diagnosis scientifically? Why not perform a careful series of experiments on persons under the influence of voluptuous ecstasy, so as to ascertain its physiological symptoms? Then perform a second series on persons engaged in mathematical work or machine designing, so as to ascertain the symptoms of cold scientific activity? Then note the symptoms of a vivisector performing a cruel experiment; and compare them with the voluptuary symptoms and the mathematical symptoms? Such experiments would be quite as interesting and important as any y...« less