Humane Professions The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876–1914

In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He captures the rise of the professional and specialist medical scientist, whose métier was animal experimentation, and whose guiding principle was 'humanity' or the reduction of the aggregate of suffering in the world. He also highlights the rhetorical rehearsal of scientific practices as humane and humanitarian, and connects these often defensive professions to meaningful changes in the experience of doing science. Humane Professions examines the strategies employed by the medical establishment to try to cement an idea in the public consciousness: that the blood spilt in medical laboratories served a far-reaching human good.

Introduction: Experior; 1. Darwin's compromise; 2. Medical monsters? 3. Of laboratories and legislatures; 4. Paget's public; 5. Cannon fire; Epilogue: Humanity and human experimentation.

Rob Boddice is currently a senior research fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland. He is an internationally renowned scholar in the histories of emotions, science and medicine. His previous volumes include The Science of Sympathy (2016), Pain: A Very Short Introduction (2017), The History of Emotions (2018) and A History of Feelings (2019). This is his tenth book.