Herbert Stiller

Herbert Stiller (born September 29, 1923 in Hanover ; † June 24, 1985 ) was a German specialist in neurology , psychiatry and psychotherapy .

Life

After his release from captivity in North Africa, Herbert Stiller began studying medicine in Göttingen in 1947. In 1953 he passed the state examination. In 1955 he finished his studies with a doctorate. Five years later, he was certified as a specialist in neurology and psychiatry. He then practiced in Göttingen , Gronau , Littenheid (Switzerland) and Hanover. After additional training in psychotherapy, he opened his own practice in Hanover in 1966.

Herbert Stiller and his wife Margot Stiller (graduate psychologist, specialist in neurology and psychiatry, psychotherapy; 1926–1978) became known nationwide and widely cited when two books by them were published in 1977 and 1979 in which they opposed the established state of research turned and questioned animal medicine from a scientific and ethical point of view. Their criticism - together with a book by Hans Ruesch (1978), a television documentary by Horst Stern (1978) and an essay by the philosopher Robert Spaemann (1979) - led to a bitter public controversy in Germany from the late 1970s Animal experiments that subsided again in the mid-1980s.

In November 1978 Herbert Stiller founded the organization Doctors Against Animal Experiments , based in Frankfurt am Main, with other medical professionals such as the Wertheim ophthalmologist and writer Reinhold Braun . Until 1982 he was on the board of the association.

Shortly before he died of leukemia , Herbert Stiller completed the manuscript for his last book The Heartless Science . In it, he deepened his criticism of animal experimentation as - in his opinion - demoralized and dehumanized science, which, through its fixation on the (animal) experimental situation, fades out dynamic life processes and the holistic human being - and thus blocks the research and development of remedies.

Plant and positions

"Animal experiment and animal experimenter"

"A lot of damage and errors could have been avoided if one had worked with methods that are valid for humans and can be transferred to humans and not with animal experiments."

- Herbert Stiller, Margot Stiller : Animal experiment and animal experimentator (1977)

In their first book, "Tierversuch und Tierexperimentator", the Stillers cited significant differences between humans and laboratory animals which, in their opinion, contribute to the fact that side effects of drugs for humans cannot be predicted or prevented. This includes, among other things, the limited, artificial, isolated habitat of the experimental animals, which intervenes deeply in their mental and physical balance, which would result in considerable changes in a whole range of organic functions. The Stillers stated that the pharmacokinetic behavior of humans and animals practically never match: “Many differentiated metabolic processes cannot be evaluated in an equivalent manner in animal experiments.” They complained that the animal experiment lacks the basis for scientific evaluability, because the group on which the experimental procedures or tests were developed, would not correspond to the group to which they are to be applied later. The results of animal experiments are worthless, since they are fundamentally not transferable to humans and can only be viewed as pseudoscientific or as an alibi function.

With the help of specific examples from research, official health data and statements from doctors and researchers such as B. Herbert Hensel , Robert Jungk or Alexander Mitscherlich tried to underpin why the "enormous financial and material expenditure for animal experiment research" should be questioned and even seem to be related to the increased health damage or therapeutic damage in humans . The Stillers also noted that experimental animal research has never been embarrassed to critically review its own questionable premises.

The couple of doctors sharply condemned the sharp increase in animal experiments in basic research that has been recorded since the end of the 19th century, as these would serve too much for an end in themselves and self-satisfaction: “The banal results in the publications of many animal experimenters are quite thought-provoking. It seems to be more a kind of industry that tries to suggest a niche in the market than real science. ”They viewed the central animal laboratories at colleges and universities primarily as“ batteries for academic titles ”.

In addition to the medical objections, the authors also dealt with psychological and social aspects of laboratory animal research. This seemed to them to be favored by the general social situation of their time. Their characteristics included: the increasing obedience to authority and science; the brutalization of society and science; the one-sided development of scientific medicine and animal-experimental psychology; the media barrier, which blocks voices critical of animal testing almost entirely; the pressure that big corporations exert. In addition, they criticized the animal experimenter's dulling process and his “peculiar ethical vacuum” vis-à-vis the suffering of the animal by quoting from scientific work or reproducing typical test procedures.

“The endeavor to grasp the complexity of mental illness syndromes as well as their multiple causal possibilities by way of a detour via animal experiments corresponds to a naivety or disdain for psychological and spiritual examination and treatment methods, which actually seems strange to scientists. There are two forms of psychosomatic medicine: One takes a holistic approach and tries to identify the disease from the side of the patient and his / her biography. The other is doing animal experiments. The latter cannot offer causal therapy. "

- Herbert Stiller, Margot Stiller : Animal experiment and animal experimentator (1977)

The reactions of many laboratory animal researchers turned out to be violent: They denied the Stillers' expertise, called their first publication Tierversuch und Animal Experimental as “pamphlets” or “scraps of smear”. The zoologist Paul Leyhausen , who criticized the book as “a particularly bad, but also dangerous example of the jumble of whole and half truths, ignorance, misrepresentation and assumptions, complete nonsense and misleading emotional stimulation”, feared: “If we are not completely blameless , we could one day have Brokdorf in the test laboratory. "

"Deadly tests. Experiments with animals and humans "

“How much human sacrifice still has to be made to finally understand that animals are anatomically, physiologically, biochemically, metabolically, biorhythmically, psychologically, intellectually and socially different from humans? The results of animal experiments are therefore not representative and often misleading with regard to humans. Anyone who elevates animal testing to a standard of drug safety, as is customary today, either acts in complete misjudgment of the facts or in truth pursues completely different goals. "

- Herbert Stiller, Margot Stiller, Ilja Weiss : Deadly Tests. Experiments with animals and humans (1979)

In her second book “Fatal Tests. Experiments with animals and people ”, the Stillers (together with the journalist Ilja Weiss ) tried to use historical and current examples to show how animal experimentation, as a consequence of the increasing influence of the one-sidedly on the measurable science-technical science, became a substitute for thinking on people Related research became how it supplanted valuable medical knowledge about humans - and how it contributed to the brutalization of medical culture and inevitably led to trials on humans with harmful effects in every era. They named advances that have been possible in medicine since antiquity through the orientation towards therapeutic practice, ie observations on humans, careful theoretical studies or self-experiments by doctors, and criticized the experimentation of several generations of doctors, in which researchers such. B. François Magendie , Claude Bernard , Iwan Petrowitsch Pawlow and Walter Rudolf Hess in their opinion led to misleading, dangerous theories.

The Stillers also commented on the criticism of their first book Tierversuch und Tierexperimentator: They replied that individual passages of their study had been taken out of context and that the critics neither raised objective objections to their arguments nor had the courage to open a public debate about animal experiments : "We could not have wished for better proof of the correctness and necessity of our criticism of animal experiments." Also the fact that Horst Stern tried to refute the psychological part of animal experiments and animal experiments in his three-part television documentary Die Stellvertreter - Tiere in der Pharmaforschung , but at the same time later had to admit that the filming in the laboratory animal laboratories had already changed him psychologically, confirmed the accuracy of their character study in the eyes of the Stillers.

The controversial statement “Animal experimenters are beings of a special kind, you shouldn't call them human beings”, which caused outrage on several occasions and has been attributed to Herbert Stiller since the 1970s, cannot be substantiated by any of his publications.

In an article published in 1980, Herbert Stiller concluded that scientific animal-experimental medicine usually only offers drugs with undesirable side effects, intensive care units and organ transplants, but no health. “That corresponds exactly to the experiment on the laboratory animal,” he concluded. In Stiller's view, this medicine produces exactly the patient it needs. For him, the problem of animal experiments was therefore not just a matter of animal welfare, but also of human protection: "The damage caused by this non-binding research ultimately affects the patient". He considered the ethical objections to animal experiments to be just as important as the medical ones, which he summarized in the above article as follows:

“Mankind has dealt with cultural grievances like human sacrifice , witch hunts , slavery , child labor and so on when the time was right. And the time is always ripe when the public is educated. The arguments of the proponents of these abuses have never proven to be sound. The gods did not destroy mankind without animal and witch sacrifices, it did not starve to death without slave or child labor and it will not be helplessly abandoned to infestation even without experimental animals. On the contrary, ethical behavior has always proven to be beneficial. "

- Herbert Stiller : Medicine in a vicious circle (1980)

Publications

• Margot and Herbert Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 .
• Margot and Herbert Stiller: Medicine in Crisis. In: Healthy Medicine. 2nd February 1978.
• Margot and Herbert Stiller, Ilja Weiss: Deadly Tests. Experiments with animals and humans. Edition Hirthammer Tier- und Naturschutz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-921288-54-1 .
• Medicine in a vicious circle. In: Ilja Weiss (Ed.): Critique of Animal Experiments. Kübler Verlag, Lampertheim 1980, ISBN 3-921265-24-X , pp. 57-72.
• Margot and Herbert Stiller: The psychologist for animal experiments and replacement (alternative) methods. In: Ingo Krumbiegel : Animal cruelty - a way into the abyss. Nordwestverlag, Hanover 1981, ISBN 3-87591-001-X .
• Medicine doesn't deliver what it says on the tin. In: AnneMarie Droeven: Irrweg Tierversuch - facts, data, background. Lenos Verlag, Basel 1985, ISBN 3 85787 138 5 , pp. 9-18.
• The heartless science. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-88721-052-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Herbert Stiller: The heartless science . Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-88721-052-2 (epilogue + back flap ).
2. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 65.
3. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 9.
4. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 15.
5. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , pp. 16-17.
6. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , pp. 40-41.
7. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 72.
8. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 73.
9. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 43.
10. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller: Animal experiment and animal experimentator. Franz Hirthammer Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921288-46-0 , p. 59.
11. ↑ Wolf H. Weihe : The animal in the experiment. Bern, Stuttgart, Vienna 1978.
12. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller, Ilja Weiss: Deadly tests. Experiments with animals and humans. Edition Hirthammer Tier- und Naturschutz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-921288-54-1 , p. 12.
13. ^ Margot and Herbert Stiller, Ilja Weiss: Deadly tests. Experiments with animals and humans. Edition Hirthammer Tier- und Naturschutz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-921288-54-1 , pp. 42–43.
14. ↑ Herbert and Margot Stiller, Ilja Weiss: Deadly tests. Experiments with animals and humans. Edition Hirthammer Tier- und Naturschutz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-921288-54-1 , p. 7.
15. ^ Herbert Stiller: Medicine in the vicious circle. In: Critique of Animal Experiments. Kübler Verlag, Lampertheim 1980, ISBN 3-921265-24-X , p. 66.
16. ^ Herbert Stiller: Medicine in the vicious circle. In: Critique of Animal Experiments. Kübler Verlag, Lampertheim 1980, ISBN 3-921265-24-X , p. 60.
17. ^ Herbert Stiller: Medicine in the vicious circle. In: Critique of Animal Experiments. Kübler Verlag, Lampertheim 1980, ISBN 3-921265-24-X , p. 72.