Texts
by Hans Ruesch
Hans
Ruesch fluently spoke and professionally wrote in 4 languages (Italian, German,
English, French). He made an effort to have translations made (by himself or
other people) of his writings, at least within these 4 languages. However, this
is not true of everything he wrote and, most importantly, there are often
considerable differences in the versions he prepared in different languages,
usually out of a concern to provide readers living in different countries with
the kind of examples they might find more relevant and useful. So those who
want to see what was the first version of his most famous tract, Slaughter of the Innocent, have no other
choice than to try and read the Italian Imperatrice
nuda.
N.B. The following texts are all copyrighted, but they
are made freely available in the disinterested spirit of their author, who was
especially keen in disseminating the results of his research, in order to
accelerate, thanks to public indignation,
the demise of a pseudoscientific, dangerous, and barbarous practice.
Reproduction for noncommercial uses through Internet
is allowed at the condition that appropriate reference to the source (including
the Internet address of this web site) is made.
Those wishing to make a commercial reprint of some
work are required to contact the Hans Ruesch Foundation, which owns the
copyright.
File pdf
(1,209 Mb)
This is a transcription of the first edition of the
book. The last edition (2005) had a new preface
by M. Mamone Capria. The English version came out in 1978 and is much longer. To buy the book please write here.
In this interview
Hans Ruesch discussed in an essential and lively manner all main issues of the
debate on vivisection. It is a very good short introduction to
antivivivisectionism.
·
1000 Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection [1989]
parte 1 - parte 2
- parte 3 - parte 4
It may be useful to note that many
of the authors cited by Ruesch in this fundamental compilation are not against vivisection. Vivisectionists
use to stress this fact as an inconsistency or as the sin of “out-of-context
citation”. Granted for the discourse’s sake the good faith of the critic, it is
hard to get it more wrong than that. In fact the circumstance that a negative
remark on vivisection is underwritten by someone who performs or otherwise
praises vivisection, does not weaken its value, indeed it magnifies it. For instance, we read that Robert Koch, a famous
vivisector who got in 1905 a Nobel prize, said in the Report to the Royal Commission of 1906, p. 31:
"An experiment on an animal gives no certain indication of the result of
the same experiment on a human being." The fact that he did not for this
reason renounce vivisection (contrary to what Prof. Dr Pietro Croce, among
others, famously did) shows at once both the poor scientific substance of vivisection and the poor scientific and
ethical quality of its practitioners (including the higher-ups).