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

• Final Report Year: 2018

Final Report Abstract

The DFG Project “The Science of Sympathy” set out to uncover the emotional underpinnings of Victorian scientific constructions of morality. Drawing together the various evolutionary notions of sympathy, it demonstrated the incoherence of early Darwinian thinking on moral and emotional questions. Darwin’s theories were used to support vivisection, compulsory vaccination and eugenics, but also held up as a means to oppose all these things. SOS explored the social, personal and practical implications of this emotional and moral ‘crisis’, as new scientific specialisms and new scientific selves emerged in this period. At the core of this were new practices and new lived experiences of sympathy, bound up with the worlds of medical research and public health administration. A particular focus point was the history of vaccination, with a more broad-based study of the role of fear in vaccine hesitancy. In addition, the project set out to understand in general terms both emotion and pain in historical context. These theoretical components were essential in informing the methodological approach for the book Science of Sympathy. The development of the project into a new, long-term project funded by the European Commission, demonstrates the intellectual richness of the research area, which I possibly underestimated at the outset. Having expected to be able to summarize the import of the research in a terminal, path-finding article, I now find myself researching and writing another book on the subject. A major public consequence of the project has emerged from the particular focus on the history of vaccination, which was a major element in the book, The Science of Sympathy, and the sole focus of the book Edward Jenner, both of which were completed during the project. This work led to a free-to-access public exhibition on vaccination and fear at McGill University in Canada. It has been exhibited twice. Two public events, which connected the history of fear and vaccination to current social and policy-based problems relating to vaccine hesitancy, were staged (Feb 2017 and April 2018). This impact was completely unforeseen in the design of the project, but represents a major success in the finessing of academic research into a format that is both publicly and politically relevant and accessible.

Publications

• Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014)
  Rob Boddice (ed.)
  
• The Affective Turn: Historicising the Emotions. Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
  Rob Boddice
  
• Edward Jenner (Stroud: The History Press, 2015)
  Rob Boddice
  
• The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016)
  Rob Boddice
  
• ‘Vaccination, Fear and Historical Relevance’, History Compass, 14 (2016)
  Rob Boddice
  
• Pain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
  Rob Boddice