This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions and its intersection with emotion research in other disciplines. It discusses how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. The revised and fully updated second edition of the book demonstrates the field’s centrality to historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work fo...

What does it mean to feel something? What stimulates our desires, aspirations and dreams? Did our ancestors feel in the same way to us? Historians have tried to make sense of our feelings, passions, moods, emotions and sentiments over the last decade in a wave of new research. For the first time, however, Rob Boddice brings together the latest findings to trace the complex history of feelings from antiquity to the present.A History of Feelings is a compelling account of the...

Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific.In a work that is sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches ...

Edward Jenner is a giant of modern medicine. Throughout history, smallpox had plagued humanity with disfigurement, blindness and death. It was an incurable blight, the suffering of which Jenner helped to end.Surmising from the immunity of milkmaids that cowpox might be some defence against the ravages of smallpox, in 1793 he took some of the matter from a human case of cowpox and inserted it into the arm of a young boy. To test this, the first human-to-hum...

Emotion, Sense, Experience calls on historians of emotions and the senses to come together in serious and sustained dialogue. The Element outlines the deep if largely unacknowledged genealogy of historical writing insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing...

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 scie...

Increasingly, critics accused practitioners of hiding hubris behind their purported humanity and questioned whether an increasingly professional scientific community could retain its grip on the meaning of compassion. This volume presents a set of responses to this criticism and others, showing the extent to which the lived-experience of scientific practice became a justification in and of itself for the expression of social, political and cultural authority. Bare knowledge, as it was pres...

This volume foregrounds humanity (in the sense of compassion or sympathy), which often supplied the motivation for medical experiment and scientific innovation. Though the results of experiments could not be known in advance, often the stated goal was the reduction of suffering, the cure of disease, or the easement of life. Increasingly, critics accused practitioners of hiding hubris behind their purported humanity and questioned whether an increasingly professional scientific community co...

This volume showcases doubt from within the scientific community itself. These sources dwell upon the moments at which ideas became challenged, when facts were revealed to be fiction, and when knowns reverted to unknowns. But the focus is not the ideas and facts themselves, but on the ways in which scientists adjusted themselves to new landscapes of uncertainty in their particular cultural and professional practices.

This volume is divided according to moral themes within medicine and science. The sources represent dominant notes within the culture of knowledge production that capture the moral/emotional/social justification for the making of expertise through experiment. This volume focuses on curiosity, given as the scientist’s chief motivating factor for the finding of new facts, and as an essential character trait for anyone entering the scientific life. It is also the source of controversy and cri...

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions.Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technologic...

What do emotions actually do? Recent work in the history of emotions and its intersections with cultural studies and new materialism has produced groundbreaking revelations around this fundamental question. In Emotional Bodies, contributors pick up these threads of inquiry to propose a much-needed theoretical framework for further study of materiality of emotions, with an emphasis on emotions' performative nature. Drawing on diverse sources and wide-ranging theoretical approaches,...