Comparative medicine

Abstract

Research on human medicine suffers from the difficulties of finding animal models of the numerous ailments, to which man is subject. Such models must be sought in man himself or in domestic or laboratory animals. Man, himself, is not available, except to a very limited extent for experimentation, and the domestic and laboratory animals in common use are far from satisfactory, because they are phylogenetically too far removed from man and respond differently to the agents of pathogenesis. For this reason, non-human primates have been extensively used in recent years. Their use is for many reasons repugnant, but such problems as that of poliomyelitis could not have been resolved in other ways. Whatever their value in some lines of research, they too do not provide satisfactory models, because their natural disease patterns in wild conditions do not in any way resemble those of man.