100 Dogs Who Changed Civilization Read Free Page A

Great Britain’s Anti-Vivisection Society, who publicly accused the doctor responsible for the Brown Dog of not properly anesthetizing him,as the law required, and of using the animal for more than one experiment, which was also illegal.
    The doctor promptly sued Coleridge for libel, but though he won the legal case, he lost in the court of public opinion. A furious uproar over the dog’s treatment erupted in the press, with one tabloid raising £5,735 to pay Coleridge’s court fine. Things really heated up when a monument to Brown Dog was raised in London. Unveiled on September 15, 1906, it was an innocuous-looking water fountain with a bronze dog on top and an incendiary inscription dedicating it, “In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903 … [after] … having been handed from one Vivisector to another till Death came to his Release.”
    Large-scale riots ensued as London medical students, bent on defacing the monument, fought running battles with neighborhood toughs. The statue was finally removed in 1910 and, it is presumed, destroyed. But the Brown Dog, and what he represented, wasn’t forgotten. In 1985 a new statue was unveiled in the London neighborhood of Battersea, bearing the same searing indictment of animal experimentation. But this time, no one came to the practice’s defense.

CAP
THE SHEPHERD’S DOG WHO
STEERED FLORENCE
NIGHTINGALE INTO NURSING

    One can’t overestimate the importance of Florence Nightingale to the medical profession. Born in 1820, the daughter of rich, upper-crust English parents, Nightingale was expected to become an obedient wife, tucked away in a country manor. Instead, she chose a life of service by becoming a nurse, one of the era’s most reviled professions. And no wonder. At the time, the typical “nurse” was an ill-trained orderly with little more medical knowledge than a scullery maid.
    But Nightingale changed all that. She studied well-run hospitals throughout Europe and became a crusader for a then-revolutionary concept: namely, that a clean, well-organized infirmary staffed by knowledgeable, sympathetic caregivers was better than a dirty, disorganized one staffed by callous, incompetent boobs—which pretty much summed up the typical facility of her era.
    She became an international celebrity during the Crimean War, in which Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire battled Russia for control of the Crimean Peninsula. Military hospital conditions were such a scandal that Nightingale, along with a small corps of volunteer nurses, was dispatchedby Britain’s secretary of war to see what could be done. By a Herculean effort, she organized the relief program so efficiently that the hospital death rate sank from 42 percent to 2 percent. Nightingale returned home a national hero and used her fame to work tirelessly for hospital reform until her death in 1910.
    What inspired her all-consuming interest in helping others? Perhaps it was an incident that took place in 1837, when Nightingale was only seventeen years old. One day, an old shepherd informed her that his dog, Cap, had been severely injured when some boys threw stones at him. One rock seemingly broke his leg, which meant he couldn’t herd sheep. The shepherd couldn’t afford to keep a lame dog, so he planned to kill Cap that evening.
    Nightingale, appalled, asked permission to visit the dog. She and a companion discovered that his leg was severely bruised, but not broken, and carefully bandaged it. A few days later, Cap was his old self.
    Soon thereafter Nightingale dreamed that God was calling her to devote her life to medicine. And the young girl, more than a little inspired by her work with Cap, heeded the call.

BOTHIE
THE ONLY DOG TO VISIT THE
NORTH AND SOUTH POLES

    Plenty of canines have pulled sleds through the Arctic and Antarctic, but one intrepid dog, a wiry Jack