page_title: Brown Dog affair
section_title: Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau
hierarchical_section_title: Brown Dog affair / Background / Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau
caption_attribution_description: Lizzy Lind af Hageby (1878–1963), British-Swedish feminist, philanthropist and anti-vivisection activist, taken in 1913 at the International Anti-Vivisection Congress in Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice; and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that divided the country.
  The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London performed an illegal vivisection, before an audience of 60 medical students, on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Outraged by the assault on his reputation, Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, sued for libel and won.
context_section_description: Starling and Bayliss's lectures had been infiltrated by two Swedish feminists and anti-vivisection activists, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau. The women had known each other since childhood and came from distinguished families; Lind af Hageby, who had attended Cheltenham Ladies College, was the granddaughter of a chamberlain to the King of Sweden.
  In 1900 the women visited the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a centre of animal experimentation, and were shocked by the rooms full of caged animals given diseases by the researchers. When they returned home, they founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden, and to gain medical training to help their campaigning, they enrolled in 1902 at the London School of Medicine for Women, a vivisection-free college that had visiting arrangements with other colleges. They attended 100 lectures and demonstrations at King's and University College, including 50 experiments on live animals, of which 20 were what Mason called "full-scale vivisection". Their diary, at first called Eye-Witnesses, was later published as The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology (1903); shambles was a name for a slaughterhouse. The women were present when the brown dog was vivisected, and wrote a chapter about it entitled "Fun", referring to the laughter they said they heard in the lecture room during the procedure.
caption: Lizzy Lind af Hageby (1878–1963)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "10211", "Image ImageLength": "7586", "Image BitsPerSample": "16", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "1", "Image Make": "Sinar", "Image Model": "54H", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "1", "Image XResolution": "1400", "Image YResolution": "1400", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2012:05:20 17:14:53", "Image Artist": "Shorpy.com", "Image ExifOffset": "288", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:04:23 17:12:19", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "295", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "383", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "1400", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "1026", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "432", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "b3d78f32c1834ab0e5ab69d855fea988"}