The Guinea Pig That Went Wrong: When a Temperance Lecture Backfired

Some old newspaper stories need a great deal of explanation.

This is not one of them.

At a meeting of a temperance society in Paris, a lecturer reportedly decided to demonstrate the dangers of alcohol with four guinea pigs.

Three guinea pigs were given various forms of alcohol.

The fourth received what the newspaper rather cheerfully called “nice pure water.”

Then all four were put away until the end of the meeting.

Already, this feels like the sort of plan that should have included labels.

The Grand Demonstration

The idea was simple enough.

At the end of the lecture, the guinea pigs would be brought back out and the audience would see what alcohol had done. Presumably three miserable little examples of the evils of drink would appear beside one bright-eyed, healthy, water-only guinea pig.

The lecturer brought them out triumphantly.

There was only one problem.

The only sick guinea pig was the teetotal one.

Yes.

The guinea pig that had been given the nice pure water was apparently the one looking rough. The other three — the animals specifically brought along to demonstrate the terrible consequences of alcohol — were doing fine.

There are bad days at work.

There are presentations where the projector refuses to cooperate.

There are meetings where you realize you brought the wrong paperwork.

And then there is standing in front of an audience while your sober guinea pig single-handedly ruins your entire lecture.

That is a different category of workplace problem.

Source: Mitchell Daily Republican, July 21, 1904, p. 6. Story credited to the Liverpool Post.

Temperance Was Serious Business

As funny as the story is now, the movement behind the lecture was anything but a joke.

Temperance was a major social reform movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Supporters blamed alcohol for poverty, family problems, crime and other social ills, and organizations held meetings, lectures and educational campaigns encouraging people to drink less or abstain altogether.

By the turn of the twentieth century, some temperance advocates were also presenting their message as science. “Scientific temperance instruction” made its way into schools and public education, although historians have since pointed out that some of the claims taught under that name stretched the meaning of scientific rather generously.

So a lecturer using an animal demonstration to make his point would not necessarily have seemed bizarre to his audience.

Four guinea pigs sitting backstage awaiting their cue probably seemed like perfectly reasonable educational equipment.

Until they came back out.

So What Actually Went Wrong?

The newspaper never tells us.

Maybe one guinea pig was already ill.

Maybe the experiment itself was badly designed.

Maybe something happened while the animals were put away.

Maybe somebody simply mixed them up.

Considering that the entire success of the presentation depended upon knowing which guinea pig had received what, this seems like a detail worth keeping track of.

A ribbon?

Four boxes?

Tiny numbered waistcoats?

Anything, really.

Instead, the lecturer appears to have reached the grand finale only to discover that his star witness had turned hostile.

Of course, the story doesn’t prove alcohol was harmless. Four guinea pigs at a public lecture were never going to settle that question.

What it does demonstrate rather nicely is the danger of planning an experiment around the result you are absolutely certain you are going to get.

Sometimes science refuses to follow the script.

Sometimes the projector breaks.

And sometimes the water guinea pig chooses chaos.

The Newspaper Knew Exactly What Had Happened

The anonymous writer could have simply reported the unfortunate result and moved on. Instead, after explaining that the supposedly healthy guinea pig was the sick one, the article finishes with: “the moral was simply shocking.”

Beautiful.

No explanation.

No rescue attempt.

No sympathetic suggestion that perhaps the lecturer should try again next Thursday with better-organized rodents.

Just five words. Or, as we know it now: mic drop.

1902 apparently knew how to make an exit.

The story certainly traveled. I found it in the Boston Sunday Post in 1902, and two years later it turned up again in South Dakota’s Mitchell Daily Republican, where the report was credited to the Liverpool Post.

Which means somewhere along the line an embarrassing guinea-pig demonstration in Paris became entertaining enough to cross an ocean.

Imagine being the lecturer.

Your experiment fails.

Your guinea pig betrays you.

You go home.

And two years later somebody in South Dakota is still reading about it over breakfast.

I Have Questions

Naturally, the newspaper leaves out everything I now desperately want to know.

We don’t get the lecturer’s name.

We don’t know which Paris temperance society held the meeting.

We don’t know whether anyone checked the guinea pigs afterward to figure out what actually happened.

And most importantly:

What became of the sober guinea pig?

Did it recover?

Was there ever a second demonstration?

Did the lecturer immediately retire from experimental science?

Did someone finally buy four labels?

And what about the other three?

Were they returned home with no idea they had just accidentally destroyed a man’s presentation?

The newspaper gives us nothing.

It simply leaves us with four guinea pigs, one failed demonstration and one absolutely wonderful headline: The Guinea Pig That Went Wrong.

Although after reading the story, I think the guinea pig deserves an apology.

The guinea pig didn’t go wrong. The PowerPoint went wrong.

It just happened to be 1902.