E X T E N S I O N SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND EVOLUTION DURING THE VICTORIAN AGE Campaigns against vivisection Wells had trained in science and wrote science journalism in the 1890s. He was therefore able to talk about many humanistic and religious concerns1 about scientific advances. Doctor Moreau is a character constructed from English fears about new kinds of continental experimental medical science. When these ideas arrived in England in the 1870s, there was a vigorous campaign against the vivisection of animals in laboratories. The Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (1873) was criticised for introducing a new moral contagion into England; publications, such as The Spectator, and institutions, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals , actively campaigned against these techniques. The image of the slightly mad foreign vivisector, uncaring2 about animal pain, was fixed in the minds of the English public by the testimony of Emanuel Klein before a Royal Commission in 1875. Klein was a Croat-Austrian scientist, who worked in London; he professed complete indifference to animal pain, explaining that he rarely used anaesthetic. Moreau s House of Pain is a direct descendant of these portraits of mad and cruel doctors. 1. concern: worry, preoccupation. 2. uncaring: indifferent. A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog ( . . Mouchy, 1832) 48