In A Nutshell
French philosopher Rene Descartes didn’t believe animals had souls, and he really did cut live ones open. But the popular story that he nailed his wife’s dog to a board to prove the point is a myth. Descartes never married, so there was no wife and no wife’s dog.
The Whole Bushel
In 1647, Rene Descartes exploded biology wide open by theorizing that the body was merely a mechanical instrument. The soul was what gave consciousness, and it resided somewhere in the pineal gland. Unfortunately for the neighborhood dogs, Descartes also theorized that only humans had souls.
If animals were soulless, they were just machines. Therefore they didn’t feel pain—they only acted as if they did. So therefore, it was okay to cut them open and experiment on them. And Descartes sure loved a good experiment.
By his own account, Descartes happily sliced open dogs and stuck his finger into their still-beating hearts, marveling at how the valves opened and closed around his knuckle. In his unfinished Description of the Human Body he walked through one such dissection to argue against the way William Harvey explained the heart.
So where does the wife’s dog come from? Nowhere solid. There is no record of Descartes nailing any pet to a board, and there was no wife to own one. Historians who have looked into it, like Peter Harrison, trace the hammer and the board to a mistake in a 1989 book. The scene fits Claude Bernard, a French physiologist who cut up dogs two centuries later, far better than it fits Descartes. Even that grislier Bernard story was never actually confirmed. For the record, Descartes kept a dog of his own, Monsieur Grat, or Mister Scratch, and the two of them went for walks together.
Show Me The Proof
Review: The Heretic’s Feast
Science Set Free, Rupert Sheldrake
Richard Dawkins on vivisection: ‘But can they suffer?’
