Rob Boddice

In this 'Very Short Introduction', Rob Boddice explores the history, culture, and medical science of pain. Charting the shifting meanings of pain across time and place, he focusses on how the experience and treatment of pain have changed. He describes historical hierarchies of pain experience that related pain to social class and race, and the privileging of human states of pain over that of other animals. From the pain concepts of classical antiquity to expressions of pain in contemporary art, and modern medical approaches to the understanding, treatment, and management of pain, Boddice weaves a multifaceted account of this central human experience. Ranging from neuroscientific innovations in experimental medicine to the constructionist arguments of social scientists, pain is shown to resist a timeless definition. Pain is physical and emotional, of body and mind, and is always experienced subjectively and contextually.

A Very Short Introduction

Pain

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 presented, came with an enormous social valuation. These sources show how that authority changed and grew over time.

Volume III: Authority

Scientific and Medical Knowledge Production, 1796-1918

Mark Smith

Emotion, Sense, Experience calls on historians of emotions and the senses to come together in serious and sustained dialogue. The book 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 emotions and sensory history into conversation. Ultimately, we envisage a new way of understanding historical lived experience generally, as a mutable product of a situated world-brain-body dynamic. Such a project necessarily points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration, especially with social neuroscience. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.

Emotion, Sense, Experience

Bettina Hitzer

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 technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.

Experiencing Medicine and Illness

Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization

The Science of Sympathy

Susan J. Matt

Peter N. Stearns

Emotion and experience in the history of medicine : elaborating a theory and seeking a method / Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer -- Feeling the dis-ease of ebola : an invisible war / Emmanuel King Urey-Yarkpawolo -- Ebola wahala : breaching experiments in a Sierra Leonean border town / Luisa Enria and Angus Fayia Tengbeh -- History before corona : memory, experience, and emotions / Bettina Hitzer -- The binary logic of emotion in the sensorium of virtual health : the case of Happify / Kirsten Ostherr -- Third person : narrating dis-ease and knowledge in psychiatric case histories / Marietta Meier -- Feeling (and falling) ill : finding a language of illness / Franziska Gygax -- Beyond symptomology : listening to how Palestinians conceive of their own suffering and well-being / Heidi Morrison -- Forensic sense : sexual violence, medical professionals, and the senses / Joanna Bourke -- The concept of Leidensdruck in West-Ferman criminal therapy, 1960-85 / Marcel Streng -- The efficacy of Arcadia : constructing emotions of nature in the pained body through landscape imagery, c.1945-present / Brenda Lynn Edgar -- 'Fashionable' diseases in Georgian Britain : medical theory, cultural meanings and lived experience / James Kennaway -- From a patient's point of view : a sensual-perceptual approach to bed treatment / Monika Ankele -- Feeling Penfield / Annmarie Adams.

Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History

The first accessible text book on the theories, methods, achievements and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry.

The History of Emotions

This collection explores assumptions behind the label ‘anthropocentrism’, critically enquiring into the meaning of ‘human’. It addresses epistemological and ontological problems in charges of anthropocentrism, questioning the inherent anthropocentrism of all human perspectives, while seeking ‘other’ views that trump anthropocentrism.

Humans, Animals, Environments

Anthropocentrism

This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions. It discusses how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Addressing criticism from within and without the discipline of history, the book offers a rigorous defence of this new approach, demonstrating its potential centrality to historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for our general understanding of the human brain and the meaning of human experience.

The history of emotions

Rob Boddice explores the transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 18761914

Humane Professions

What does it mean to feel something? What stimulates our desires, aspirations, and dreams? Did our ancestors feel in the same way as we do? In a wave of new research over the past decade, historians have tried to answer these questions, seeking to make sense of our feelings, passions, moods, emotions, and sentiments. 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 unsaid—the gestural, affective, and experiential. Arguing that how we feel is the dynamic product of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space, Boddice uses a progressive approach that integrates biological, anthropological, and social and cultural factors, describing the transformation of emotional encounters and individual experiences across the globe. The work of one of the world’s leading scholars of the history of emotions, this epic exploration of our affective life will fascinate, enthrall, and move all of us interested in our own well-being—anyone with feeling.

Rob Boddice

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