history of medicine, history of science, recent biomed
More on small animal guillotines — an invisible practice
I distributed my memory of being a biochemistry student swinging rats by their tails through the air so the neck landed on a bench edge (no blood, just a momentarily broken neck) to the rete list, adding:
It took some training to land it exactly on the edge, though; some less manually skilled students smashed the rat’s back on the table, which only paralysed it. I must confess that I sort of liked this swinging procedure, to the great admiration and horror of some of the other (female) students. Sublime! Gothic biochemistry, to paraphrase Bruce Sterling.
This provoked another round of comments, which I take the liberty to quote from (they are publicly accessible in rete’s online archive), because they throw some additional light on the rat guillotine phenomenon.
Frank Manasek (cf. earlier post) remembers that “there actually was very little blood – the little critters don’t have a lot”:
Lab rats are pretty big and I never saw the guillotine used on rats – Thomas is right – the swinging technique was preferred. I seem to recall that mice and hamsters weigh about 100 grams and rats maybe 5 times that. Rats also bite so you have to be careful.
and adds that:
A drawback of the guillotine is that the decapitated animal has spasms and if you want to get an organ out very quickly it can be a problem. I used to take out hamster spleens and there was always a slight delay. A table-edged rat only quivered.
Steven Turner at the Smithsonian (see also earlier post), remember chatting with the scientist who brought the rat guillotine in to their collection:
It was part of a large group of instruments that he had pulled out of the trash as the FDA labs were being reorganized. He hadn’t worked with the guillotine personally, but we all assumed that the red base was to disguise the blood released during decapitation. However, since Frank and others report very little blood being “spilled” this may not be correct. It’s possible that the red paint was meant as a caution aqainst cutting off one’s own finger – which seems like a real possibility with this instrument. On the other hand, a busy government testing lab might have sacrificed a lot of animals.
To which Frank responds:
Steve, on a busy morning I might have sacrificed 200 hamsters – very little blood as I recall. Mostly fur clogging the knife. Yes there was danger of finger loss- animals often were sacrificed in a cold room (4 C) – my hamsters were (the reason here was that they were cold-adapted) and fingers could get numb quickly.
These interesting comments remind me about that we are dealing here with a kind of invisible practice in the history of recent biomedicine. A practice that permeats much of the daily routines in the laboratory but is almost unaccessible through the published literature or laboratory notebooks. A practice that, to my best knowledge, no oral historian of biomedicine or biomedical memoir has so far touched upon.
14 Jul 2009 Thomas
There’s definitely a research project there.
Also, the whole history of guillotines are connected to the history of medicine from the French revolution onwards:
Word History: “At half past 12 the guillotine severed her head from her body.” So reads the statement containing the first recorded use of guillotine in English, found in the Annual Register of 1793. Ironically, the guillotine, which became the most notable symbol of the excesses of the French Revolution, was named for a humanitarian physician, Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Guillotin, a member of the French Constituent Assembly, recommended in a speech to that body on October 10, 1789, that executions be performed by a beheading device rather than by hanging, the method used for commoners, or by the sword, reserved for the nobility. He argued that beheading by machine was quicker and less painful than the work of the rope and the sword. In 1791 the Assembly did indeed adopt beheading by machine as the state’s preferred method of execution. A beheading device designed by Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the College of Surgeons, was first used on April 25, 1792, to execute a highwayman named Pelletier or Peletier. The device was called a louisette or louison after its inventor’s name, but because of Guillotin’s famous speech, his name became irrevocably associated with the machine. After Guillotin’s death in 1814, his children tried unsuccessfully to get the device’s name changed. When their efforts failed, they were allowed to change their name instead.
Taken from: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guillotine
From high-featured French Revolution to invisible laboratory rat practice…
This is an interesting discussion. I concur with Thomas that little if any historical work has been done on killing laboratory animals. This is likely as such practices are particularly invisable to the historian, being tacitly communicated and existing in locally specific forms. They also touch on key ethical issues of course. There have been some ethnological/sociological studies that address the act of sacrifice (Arnold Arluke in Anthrzoos in 1998), much of which feeds into Birke, Arluke and Michael’s 2007 The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People. There is also a volume by the Animal Studies Group on Killing Animals (but does not lab animals directly as I recall).
From my own work on the history of lab animal welfare my sense is the guillotine may have been relatively unique to biomedicine in terms of animal killing, but it is not a subject I have looked at in great detail as yet and am unsure if there were/are applications in the meat industry. There were (and no doubt are) numerous tools that would shed a material light on the history of lab animal practice – none more unexpected than the automated rat milking machine I came across a few weeks ago – it is good to see some being preserved.