The book Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876–1914 (Cambridge University Press 2021) by HEX senior research fellow Rob Boddice has been published. The book explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. Boddice 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.
More information is available on the publisher’s website.