The Poet-Physician and The Healer-Killer

History of animal vivisection and its critics, arguing that abuse of animals is linked to flaws in our medical system

The Poet-Physician and the Healer-Killer is a social history of a popular movement and how propaganda defeated it, so that it lost its place in historic accounts of the Victorian Era.  Run your finger down the indices of history and literary books about the Victorian Era, and look for the words, “vivisection” or “Anti-vivisection. You’re not likely to find them. Standard histories of the age will not inform a reader that academic vivisection—experimenting on animals and human beings—began in the Victorian Era and that it was first met with furious horror on the part of the English public and the press. In The Poet-Physician and the Healer-Killer, vivisection and its counter assault, the anti-vivisection movement, take their place in the history of the Victorian Age. The book demonstrates how both movements grew out of Victorian ideas and philosophy concerning progress and that the anti-vivisection movement grew out of the Feminist Movement in the nineteenth century and that we, in the 21st century, still suffer the consequences.

While there are many books on animal research, The Poet-Physician and the Healer-Killer makes three unique contributions to this  subject.

1) The historic context of the book is from the time of the poet John Keats who, trained as a doctor, sought a definition of medical practice based on sympathy,  to the time of the Nazi doctors, as the book traces the Nazis' use of human beings for experimental purposes to the rise of academic vivisection in the Victorian age. It  illuminates how the practice of vivisection was conceived as the philosophical metaphor for the "Enlightenment,"  for science as "a male discipline,"  for progress, and for the conquest of nature, as articulated by one of its great practitioners, Claude Bernard.

2)  Ms. Kalechofsky illuminates how the merger of the woman's movement in the Edwardian era, with the anti-vivisection movement gave the medical profession its propaganda platform of the anti-vivisectionists as "little old women in sneakers."  Vivisection became a symbol for machismo and the denunciation of sentiment as a female weakness. This gender dichotomy was important to the advancement of vivisection.

3)  The dispute between the vivisectionists and the "Sanitarians," as environmentalists were called in the 19th century, and the victory of the vivisectionists has had enormous—and disastrous—implications for our present-day health care problems, by focusing on curing rather than preventing disease.

Told in a blend of autobiography and scholarship, the author has tackled subtle historical problems with wit, humor, and anguish and has captured the colorful personalities of the men and women who led the battle against vivisection in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Praise for The Poet-Physician and The Healer-Killer:

"In 35 year of reading books and articles about the treatment of animals I have seen nothing that so illuminates the connection between the horrors of vivisection and the horrors of human experimentation. With style and grace, the book traces the history of so-called medical advances, particularly in the 19th century and reveals that the foundation of uncritical adulation of physicians has its roots in unthinkable atrocities....Even specialists in medical ethics will discover they have a great deal to learn from Dr. Kalechofsky.  I cannot overpraise this book."   
Professor Sidney Gendin, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University

"I think the book is a work of profound scholarship and insight.  Not a page goes by without the reader learning something new, something important.  The writing throughout is clear, accessible, and sometimes...both vivid and heartbreaking.  All things considered, [Ms. Kalechofsky] has wrought nothing less than a landmark book."  
Professor Tom Regan, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, North Carolina State University, author of The Case for Animal Rights

"You have written a very impressive book (and certainly by no means your first such.)  It is thought-provoking, stimulating, and well documented.  It will be an important contribution to the dialogue. Congratulations."  
Norman Phelps,  author of The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA