The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilisation

• Applicant: Rob Boddice, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 234464910

Science of Sympathy (SOS) explores the connection among the history of emotions, pain, and morality in the context of scientific, medical and social practices. It began in 2013 and now has five major components: 1. A monograph, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilisation; 2. An edited collection of essays on emotional pain - sympathy, compassion, pity, fear, grief - and the practices that arise from it in comparative historical contexts, under the title Pain and Emotion in Modern History (already published); 3. A small biography of the father of small pox vaccination, Edward Jenner; 4. A comprehensive introduction to the history of pain, from antiquity to the present, for Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series. 5. Two articles on the relation of science, sympathy and the self in the context of shifting scientific and medical understandings of emotions. SOS aims to continue to uncover the emotional underpinnings of Victorian scientific constructions of morality, extending the scope back before the seminal intervention of Darwin. Darwin's theories were used to support vivisection, compulsory vaccination and eugenics, but also held up as a means to oppose all these things. Having drawn together the various evolutionary notions of sympathy, to demonstrate the incoherence of early Darwinian thinking, SOS seeks to explore the social, personal and practical implications of this emotional and moral crisis. Having delivered a new historiographical framework for approaching the history of morality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, SOS aims further to develop this historiographical framework, extending it to more general questions in the history of science and medicine in the longue durée. SOS also aims to employ a history of emotions approach to the big question of pain (physical and emotional) with a broad historical and global scope (antiquity to contemporary medical science).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants