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Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was a prolific nineteenth-century American writer who, by the time of her death in 1911, had published over fifty books as well as hundreds of articles, poems, and short stories in some of the leading magazines of her day. Phelps's novels and essays pushed the boundaries for women, advocating for their right to economic independence and access to higher education as well as to professions in areas traditionally closed to them, like the ministry and medicine. Toward the end of her life, Phelps turned her attention to a new cause. Beginning in the 1890s, she and her husband, Herbert Ward, aligned themselves with the antivivisection movement in Massachusetts, then a leading center of animal rights activism. Between 1896 and 1902, they were instrumental in promoting legislation to regulate this practice, which involved conducting experiments on live animals. In connection with that work, she wrote several letters to William W. Keen, a distinguished Philadelphia surgeon and medical researcher, seeking his support.1 However, Keen pointedly rejected Phelps's request, observing in his letter to her dated 21 November 1902, "There seems to be no common ground for minds holding positions so far apart as yours and mine. Those who would abolish or even restrict the progress of knowledge by vivisection, kind as they may believe their motives to be, are to my mind guilty of the most horrible cruelty to animals and to man."2 This rejection, combined with the failure of the efforts to secure passage of the bills in Massachusetts, seems to have contributed to Phelps's decision to engage the topic in a way that was familiar to her: She wrote a novel. In 1904, she published Trixy, a book whose entire plot is constructed around the topic of vivisection. As a novel, Trixy functions on one level as a standard polemic against vivisection and the suffering it inflicts on animals. However, to this standard plot Phelps adds a strikingly innovative story line that was both intensely personal for this long-term invalid yet also consistent with her lifelong interrogation of a male-dominated medical establishment. In Th'xy, Phelps argues that the widespread practice of training physicians in vivisection laboratories actually contributed to making them bad doctors.
Phelps had explored the topic of vivisection before Trixy,...