* MacPherson counters that bullet wounds are rarely, at the outset, painful. Research by eighteenth-century scientist/philosopher Albrecht von Haller suggests that it depends on what the bullet hits. Experimenting on live dogs, cats, rabbits, and other small unfortunates, Haller systematically catalogued the viscera according to whether or not they register pain. By his reckoning, the stomach, intestines, bladder, ureter, vagina, womb, and heart do, whereas the lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys “have very little sensation, seeing I have irritated them, thrust a knife into them, and cut them to pieces without the animals’ seeming to feel any pain.” Haller admitted that the work suffered certain methodological shortcomings, most notably that, as he put it, “an animal whose thorax is opened is in such violent torture that it is hard to distinguish the effect of an additional slight irritation.”