Homophile - Unrelated Meaning of "Homophile", in Laboratory Experimentation On Animals

Unrelated Meaning of "Homophile", in Laboratory Experimentation On Animals

With no relationship to the dominant sense of "homophile", in an 1896 article on vivisection in Proceedings of the American Microscopical Society, Pierre A. Fish used the term "homophile" to refer to advocates of animal vivisection as an alternative to early-stage human experimentation. He used the Latin word "homo" (meaning "human") as the basis of the word— unrelated to the Greek word "homos" (ὁμός, "same") which is the basis of the established and now exclusive sense of "homophile". (See the entry "Homosexuality"’s subsection "Etymology".) To contrast with "homophiles", Fish used the word "zoophiles", to refer to antivivisectionists, with that usage being similarly independent of the established and now exclusive sense of the word— namely, "zoophile" as referring to a person exhibiting a sexual preference for one or more species of non-human animal. (Main article: "Zoophilia".) Fish's idiosyncratic senses of "homophile" and "zoophile" did not find widespread acceptance, perhaps in part because of the other, striking meanings of the terms.