This article introduces a person who is little known and studied in the Brazilian and South-American academic communities. Frances Power Cobbe was a British woman in the Victorial period engaged in various social causes, among them the abolition of vivisection. In her later years, Cobbe criticized any use of live animals in laboratory experiments, with or without the use of anesthetics. Our initial focus is on the relationship between Cobbe and Charles Darwin and the conflict they both were involved in regarding the ethical legitimacy of using live animals in physiological experiments for the good (or not) of knowledge and mankind.
vivisection; common descent; experimental physiology; Darwinism; Frances Power Cobbe
