"I have no objection to vivisection, provided that the vivisectors experiment on themselves." – Lind af Hageby

Rare copy of the shocking anti-vivisectionist work, a revised diary of the authors' firsthand observations originally published as EYE-WITNESSES. This edition includes the later-suppressed chapter "Fun," whose allegations of grotesque experimental cruelty led Stephen Coleridge of the British National Anti-Vivisection Society to directly accuse physiologist William Bayliss of violating the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. Bayliss responded with a lawsuit, and once victorious, achieved the suppression of THE SHAMBLES OF SCIENCE and the surrender of all the publisher's remaining copies to his lawyers. When the text was once more made available, the offending story — allegedly false in some particulars — had been excised. The furor surrounding the so-called 'Brown Dog Affair' extended beyond legal proceedings to riots and vandalism committed by pro-vivisectionist medical students against an opposing coalition of women suffragists, trade unionists, and other segments of the British public generally opposed to extreme cruelty with or without questionable scientific justification.

The association between early 20th-century feminism and animal cruelty reform was a strong one, arising out of the ferment of late-Victorian reformist movements and accelerated by a medical profession that historically had not hesitated to alternately infantilize and animalize women patients. The frequent association of disparate progressive causes in the interest of coalition building was another factor, as was the absolutist ethical philosophy ably expressed by Lind af Hageby and Schartau. The question of whether suffering by the powerless should trouble the powerful, and the question of how much suffering may be deemed acceptable collateral damage in the noble pursuit of knowledge, were of consuming interest to both overlapping groups of activists; and indeed they still are.

A text of great historical importance to law, science, feminism, and social reform, SHAMBLES has no records at auction and appears in only four institutional holdings (via OCLC) in the United States.