Frances Power Cobbe > Quotes

“My great panacea for making society at once better and more enjoyable would be to cultivate greater sincerity.”
― Frances Power Cobbe

“Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits Matrimony, dealt with alike by your law?”
― Frances Power Cobbe, Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors

“As the main work of civilization has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I think, to insist that the practice of Vivisection, in which this tyranny of strength culminates is a retrograde step in the progress of our race, a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less anomalous than it is deplorable and portentous.”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Moral Aspects of Vivisection

“It is now nearly a quarter of a century since I was startled into a review of my own work on the surgery of the arteries, and led to the humiliating recognition of the fact that the conclusions obtained from a series of experiments on animals could not be applied to man, and that our efforts to adapt them were leading us into serious surgical blunders. An extended investigation into which I was further attracted by the rising discussion of this question forced upon me the opinion that Syme and Fergusson were right when they stoutly asserted that surgery had in no way been advanced by experiments on animals. I knew these two men intimately. . . . They were the two greatest surgeons I have ever known. . . . I decide altogether against vivisection, because it is inherently objectionable from my religious point of view, because it is clumsy and inexact, and because it has very frequently, if indeed it has not always, been found altogether misleading.— Prof. LAWSON TAIT (1896)”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Antivivisection Question

“Here is another, also called a moral experiment, which I quote from a speech by Dr. Shaw, delivered quite recently before the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, " The operator began by treating the animal kindly and winning its love and confidence. When these were secured he cut off an ear of the dog, who looked astonished but manifested no resentment. Next day he cut off a paw, and a few days afterwards another. Thus he went on from one outrage to another, slashing and stabbing till the experiment was complete. It was astonishing how much the animal endured before his confidence was gone and his love turned to hate. After the second paw was removed he continued to gaze up into his master's face, and to lick the hand that maimed him. ~ CHARLES BELL TAYLOR (1892)”
― Frances Power Cobbe, The Antivivisection Question