For Which Life Is a Burden

I make it a practice to share amusing and colorful passages from the books I'm reading.  (Previously.)  To that end, from Louis Pasteur, by Patrice Debré (translated into English by Elborg Forster):

For all the shortcomings of this reductionist approach, one must recognize that pathological anatomy and cytology did have the merit of bringing the laboratory into the hospital.  Yet the very concept of the medical experiment was still far from rigorously defined; thus one can read in one textbook of the period that experiments on rabbits cannot be considered conclusive, for "the rabbit is a neurasthenic animal for which life is a burden, and which is only too glad to get rid of it."

What!