Suicide Medicine: a digression

We've seen the victims of clothing, sports, hunting, trapping, whaling, and pest control stick up for the institutions that did them in. And now it's medicine's turn.

Rushing from his graduation ceremony at upstate New York's Taconic Farms, Inc. (motto: "We’re dedicated to providing the quality animal models and services that can help you accelerate your research and improve your position in a competitive market"), the Rattus norvegicus subject has just been awarded the degree that will allow him to be experimented on and killed. His eyes sparkle with visions of a future dedicated to the promise of anonymity. He will receive a number—such as 6621-M—but never a name. Never an identity, apart from his disease model or phenotype. Never any consideration save what the law requires. And that's just how he wants it!

Let the rats dallying with their social sciences, their arts, their literatures—their soft world of the inexact and impractical—concern themselves with matters of the self. With signifiers and identity.

Our rat deals in Science! The quantifiable and repeatable. The impersonal and numerical! Science is the master to whom he is happily enslaved! The heady march of Progress! Where they strive for the future, those peerers into microscopes, he'll be there, contributing his tiny portion to Truth!

(Thanks to Dr. Eugen for the referral and to Seymour Miles for the photo.)