Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lightman, Bernard

Titel

The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization

Ist Teil von

• Victorian Studies, 2018-09, Vol.61 (1), p.128-130

Ort / Verlag

Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization, Rob Boddice has brought together two fields of study, the history of emotions and the cultural history of Victorian science, to provide new insights into three subjects that have previously received plenty of scholarly attention. The conclusion to the entire book emphasizes the point that the expansion of physiology, the adherence of a policy of enforced public health, and the founding of eugenics could only have occurred after a "major (if temporary) disruption of assumptions about the origins, meanings, and implications of sympathy" was defended by a large group of influential intellectuals (143). Depicting the physiological laboratory as "the most contested and controversial site in the scientific world in the last third of the nineteenth century," Boddice contrasts the scientists' image of it as the site of medical progress to their opponents' view of the lab as "nothing but a glorified torture chamber" (75).