Magnan (1847)

Eugene Magnan, another Magendian student, enraged delegates at the 1874 British Medical Association's congress by injecting alcohol and absinthe into two dogs. The first animal became "dead drunk" while the second had an epileptic seizure. Both later died [36]. The event had at least three consequences. It: (1) made members of the medical profession prosecutable under an amended form of Martin's 1822 Act; (2) revealed to both anti-vivisectionists and scientists that a law dealing specifically with experimental animal protection was required; (3) re-animated Cobbe's anti-vivisectionism [15]. It also involved an attempted demonstration of intravenous anaesthesia which failed.

### Henniker and Playfair (1875)

Cobbe, working with the RSPCA and indirect support from Queen Victoria, lobbied the Government to legislate against vivisection. In May 1875, the Henniker Bill for Regulating the Practice of Vivisection was introduced to Parliament [37]. The Bill proposed—amongst other things—that "recovery (from anaesthesia) experiments required special approval and that anaesthetics be used in all experiments, excepting those undertaken by individuals with a personal license". One week later a second Bill representing the scientists' views was read. This, the Playfair Bill, proposed the regulation of painful animal experiments but recommended the legalisation of painless experiments, including those conducted under anaesthesia. Licenses for painful experiments undertaken without anaesthesia could be granted on several grounds, including "when the use of anaesthesia interfered with the experiment". The two Bills were in unexpected accord over the general undesirability of painful experiments but su fficiently contradictory to prompt the appointment of a Royal Commission, the creation of the World's first anti-vivisection society and the establishment of the *Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research*.

The subsequently appointed Royal Commission of Enquiry spent less time in discussing the undesirability of painful experiments—over which there was some consensus—than in deliberating whether curare was an anaesthetic. The final recommendation was that curare would not be considered an anaesthetic by law, but the rest of the Commission's findings satisfied neither side who set about drafting new Bills.
