Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments

The term ‘vivisection’ is a compound, which is derived from the Latin words ‘vivus’ (living) and ‘sectio’ (cutting), thus literally meaning ‘cutting living bodies’. 1 Its early Latin forerunners were ‘incidere vivorum corpora’ 2 (cutting the bodies of the living) in Roman Antiquity and ‘vivi animantis sectio’ 3 (cutting of a living being), ‘vivorum sectio’ 4 (cutting of the living) or ‘viva sectio’ 5 (cutting alive) in the Renaissance. Whereas in this period the terms had been used interchangeably for both human and animal vivisection, in the seventeenth century the corresponding general terms for the section or dissection of living beings, ‘vivorum anatomia’, 6 animantium dissectio’, 7 ‘vivorum dissectio’, 8 and ‘vivorum sectio’, 9 were sometimes differentiated, e.g. by ‘vivorum hominum sectio’ 10 (cutting of living human beings) and ‘vivorum brutorum sectio’ 11 (cutting of living animals). The compound ‘vivisectio’ and its introduction into English 12 and German 13 as ‘vivisection’ can be traced back to the first half of the eighteenth century.