A Battle of Images

Battles over animal experimentation played out in live debates at city clubs, through radio broadcasts, and at raucous public hearings. The most powerful means of communication for both sides, however, tended to be print media with eye-popping images. The National Society of Medical Research, founded by Carlson and Ivy in 1945 sought to promote the work of scientists by circulating photographs of healthy laboratory animals and to aggressively combat critics through new, and often humorous, pamphlets and publications. For antivivisectionists, images and purple prose were the most immediate way to convey the supposedly gruesome nature of laboratory work. Scientists became increasingly wary of spies within their laboratories—in one case, an antivivisectionist briefly employed as a laboratory technician at University of Chicago’s Billings Memorial Hospital delivered a lurid report of the atrocities he allegedly witnessed to the Chicago Herald and American, which published a slew of articles on the subject. At the middle of the last century, questions of authenticity became increasingly critical to these debates as each side presented idealized or damning images of a controversial practice.