The Funeral of Hans Ruesch, by Guenday

 

 

The Memorial Service for Hans Ruesch was held on Monday, September 17th, 2007, at the cemetery in Massagno, next to Lugano, in his native Switzerland, where Hans had lived for the last decades of his life.

 

The Service, organized by his three children, began at 4 pm, at the cemetery gates, where those in attendance followed the hearse containing Hans' casket, in light-colored wood and adorned with a large bouquet of, mainly, gold and fuchsia-striped sunflowers. This seemed appropriate for Hans, as sunflowers are more a symbol of life and fecundity, rather than death. And Hans was a master of every activity that he undertook in his long life, as well as an amazingly prolific writer, whose last book, true to his vow to do nothing else but fight vivisection until it would be abolished, was published against vivisection last year, in Italy.

 

At the chapel in the cemetery the casket was transported by Hans' sons and friends onto the ornate, enclosed funeral bier in front of the benches where the congregation sat down. The first person to speak was Hans Ruesch Jr, followed by Hans' daughter, Vivian Ruesch Mellon. They both spoke in Hans' mother tongue, Italian, so I do not know what they said, except that I could make out that both referred at length to Hans' anti-vivisection work. Vivian Ruesch Mellon introduced her husband, an American who spoke to the assembly in English, and very eloquently, about his father-in-law. Mr Mellon has promised us a copy of his address, and when we have it, we will post it, and even have it translated into French for those who do not read English.

 

After Mr Mellon, Madame Pratesi, of the Hans Ruesch Foundation, spoke, again in Italian, and then the ceremony ended with a recording of Bach's Jésu Joy of Man's Desiring.

 

After the ceremony, and on the steps of the chapel, we congregated for quite some time, exchanging Hans Ruesch anecdotes. The upshot of these was the confirmation of the observations that Mr Mellon had made in what he had said earlier: that Hans' first love was animals, and that he believed in God and, therefore, in an afterlife. And we, outside the family, discovered that Hans' children were never, as Hans had so often imagined, against his anti-vivisection work. On the contrary, they are each very sincerely proud of all their father's work.

 

In fact, I had been worried that Hans' children might be bourgeois, snobbish and frosty people. On the contrary, they were warm and unpretentious, as well as handsome and dignified, and they spoke with great admiration of their father, despite the hardships of being a child of such a difficult, often coldly intellectual, and exclusive man.

 

Hans' daughter told me that her father's remains would be cremated, and then she would carry them to Geneva, where they will be buried at Hans's father's grave, since Hans had always loved his father so deeply, despite losing him at sixteen.

 

What will be done with Hans' papers will be decided, according to Hans Ruesch Jr, by the members of Hans' Foundation, and I was told that we should not worry; everyone understands their value and importance, and there is no doubt but that they will be carefully preserved.

 

Humanity's Arch-Warrior in the Battle against Vivisection and False Medicine has died and been buried, but those he touched remain, fired with the knowledge he put in his books and reports, and will carry on the struggle, inspired by his example. Undoubtedly, from where he now looks down on this world, he will encourage us, help us, and spur us on... until the war has been won.

 

 

Eulogy for Hans Ruesch, delivered by his Son-in-law, James Mellon, at Lugano, Switzerland, September 17, 2007

 

When I think of all the tiresome people whose daughter I could have married, I thank Almighty God that my father-in-law was Hans Ruesch! I got more stimulation from talking to him for half an hour than to some people for their entire lives.

 

He was a complicated and brilliant man and one of the few truly original thinkers that I have known. He was a driven individual - a man of many parts: a suicidally daring auto racer, the author of six delightful novels, and of course the pioneering scientific and medical reformer whom the world remembers and will not be able to forget. And what I particularly respect is that he achieved excellence in every field of endeavour where he exerted himself. He never did anything badly or with half a heart.

 

Of the twelve young drivers who entered the racing circuit in Hans' group, nine were killed. And I continue to believe that his novel, The Racer, should really have been named The Last Charioteer, because that is what he was. His victory in the Donington Grand Prix of 1936 was so memorable that, last year, on the 70th Anniversary of that event, the organizers of Donington invited him to come to England to receive a commemorative award. He replied that a recent injury would prevent him from attending in person, and he added that unfortunately the accident had not occurred in a racing car but by falling on the front steps of a courthouse, during one of his innumerable lawsuits. His humor never failed him.

 

Of his six novels, three of which were bestsellers, two came to be filmed, and his finest fictional work, South of the Heart, was also slated to be screened, but it would have required an enormous cast for the desert battle scenes, and so for budgetary reasons it had to be abandoned. Indeed, I continue to suspect that all of Hans's novels were written deliberately for the screen, because they are so perfectly suited for that purpose.

 

It was not until late middle age that he embarked on the crusade which made his name a household word in so many countries - his fierce, implacable attack on the practice of animal experimentation. It is for this, more than for his novels or his victories at the track, that Hans Ruesch will be remembered.

 

There was a time when doctors confidently applied leeches to the bodies of people who were suffering from fever. George Washington was killed by his doctors in precisely that way. There was also a time when men who believed that the world was round were burned at the stake. It is a sad truth that few people have the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom - to confront the most sacrosanct, most fiercely-held and most dangerous prejudices. Hans Ruesch had the valour to challenge the usefulness of animal experiments, and his wisdom is, at this very moment, being vindicated. European regulators have set the year 2009 as the deadline for ending all animal experiments for the development of cosmetics.

 

Dozens of American companies are now experimenting on human tissue samples, instead of on laboratory animals. And most important of all, a study by the National Academy of Sciences, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Environmental Conservation, now favours the elimination of animal experimentation in favour of testing on human cells. The truth continues to emerge, as it always does, no matter how many liars, greedy opportunists and fools attempt to conceal it.

 

Hans Ruesch succeeded in demonstrating that vivisection - the term that he expanded to include all animal experiments - has resulted in so much false and misleading information that literally millions of people have lost their lives, on account of it, not to mention the untold number of animals that have suffered deaths which are too gruesome to describe and too numerous to count. On balance, animal experimentation has been a crime against humans and animals, alike. It has been a crime against life.

 

That the cruel folly of this malpractice is at last being recognized by its true, ugly face is what my father-in-law devoted thirty years of his life to achieve. And, happily, the uphill battle that he so resolutely waged with pitifully inadequate resources and against heavily-entrenched and formidable opponents was not fought in vain.

 

That said, it would fatuous and one-sided of me to speak only of Hans's admirable qualities. They were many, but like all of us, he had his faults.

 

It is altogether commendable that he seethed with rage at the sight of useless suffering in humans or animals and that he did not tamely suffer the opposition of charlatans or numbskulls. But, consumed as he was by anger, he often chose to attack, when the real challenge was to persuade - to convince his peers, in the medical and scientific professions, that he was right. There were times when he failed to understand that one person cannot persuade another by launching an offensive. And while the seventy lawsuits that he fiercely contested certainly gained him the public notice that he longed for and enjoyed, they also enabled his opponents to cast him as an excessively aggressive crank, and on balance I believe they damaged his cause more than they advanced it.

 

He had another problem, too: Sadly, my father-in-law needed disciples more than he needed a family. But he already had a family, when he launched his anti-vivisection crusade, and the obsessive totality with which he pressed his attack on animal experiments caused him to substantially exclude everyone from his life who was not a blind follower of his and an active participant in his struggle. As a consequence, Hans's marriage failed and his children, who always wished him well in his endeavours but who had families, business obligations and preoccupations of their own, came to feel estranged from him. For each of us has only so much of life to give, and anyone who decides to give his whole life to his work, must expect that his family relationships will suffer.

 

I visited with Hans for two weeks, during the last full month of his life. When not under morphine or in terrible pain, he was completely lucid, and we had some memorable conversations. I was not surprised when he finally admitted to me that he like animals a little bit more than people. What did surprise me is that he believed in God. The general drift of his remarks, over the years, had somehow persuaded me that he was an atheist. When I asked him directly whether he believed in God, he astonished me by instantly answering, 'Yes.' Whereupon I told Hans that a merciful God must surely love him for having raised his voice for those who have no voice and for defending the most defenceless of God's creatures, the animals.

 

My dear friends and relatives, the pharaohs of Egypt did not all live to see their pyramids completed, and what saddens me about Hans Ruesch's life is that he did not live to witness the final, complete vindication of his beliefs. But we can take a large measure of consolation from knowing that he died secure in the conviction that his message had been delivered to a world that desperately needed to hear it, and that no power on Earth could any longer prevent it's eventual acceptance, universally.

 

I will close by saying that it beggars my imagination to find words which would adequately express my pride at having been the son-in-law of this remarkable man.