v. [Back-formation from VIVISECTION.]
1. trans. To dissect (an animal) while living; to perform vivisection upon.
1864. Daily Tel., 1 Aug., 5/1. Much as they vivisect live animals at Alfort.
1876. Ruskin, Fors Clav., lxx. 320. Modern naturalists, not being able to vivisect the Psyche, have … resolved that animals are to be classed by their bones.
1890. G. A. Smith, Isaiah, II. xii. 202. We do not vivisect our murderers nor kill them off by gladiatorial combats.
transf. 1892. W. H. Hudson, Naturalist in La Plata, 180. These insects … house them in cells where the grubs can vivisect them at leisure.
1893. Selous, Trav. S. E. Africa, 413. The piteous cries … of a donkey being vivisected by hyænas.
b. fig. To investigate as if by vivisection; to examine or criticize minutely or mercilessly.
1876. Rhoda Broughton, Joan, I. xx. On the contrary, I live in hopes of seeing a successor or two [i.e., suitors] vivisected.
1880. Ruskin, in 19th Cent., June, 950. The modern novelist … cannot easily, in a city population, find a healthy mind to vivisect.
2. intr. To practise vivisection.
1883. S. Coleridge, Vivisection, 13. Surely a man must be at his wits’ end before he could gravely put forward such an argument as this in defence of a claim to vivisect by wholesale.
Hence Vivisected ppl. a.; Vivisecting vbl. sb. and ppl. a.; also Vivisectee·, that which is vivisected; Vivise·ctible a., capable of being, liable to be, vivisected.
1859. Todd’s Cycl. Anat., V. 317/2. The artificial vomiting of *vivisected animals.
1880. Meredith, Tragic Com., v. The vivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch.
1886. Pall Mall G., 3 June, 5/2. Whether any attempt at the absolute prohibition of vivisection would not react to the disadvantage of the unhappy *‘vivisectees.’
1875. G. Hoggan, Lett., in Morn. Post, 2 Feb. I am inclined to look upon anæsthetics as the greatest curse to *vivisectible animals.
1862. Sat. Rev., XVI. 15 Aug., 214/1. No less than 200,000 instances of vivisection must have taken place in each and in every one of the hundred *vivisecting French medical schools.
1876. J. J. G. Wilkinson, Hum. Sci. & Div. Rev., 21. The vivisecting scalpel is all human cruelty. Ibid., 67. Facts of life … which must for ever escape the vivisecting mind.
1890. ‘R. Boldrewood,’ Miner’s Right (1899), 59/2. The Doctor … looks at Cyrus with a vivisecting eye. Ibid., 65/2. He did not choose to adopt the vivisecting process permitted to counsel in the higher courts.
1897. V. C. Melville, in Our Dumb Animals (Boston), Nov., 70/2. Despite his entreaties the angel conducted him from one laboratory to another, from one vivisecting table to another, where every species of torture that science or curiosity could invent he saw applied to the helpless dumb creatures, whose cries seemed to pierce his very soul.
