Sympathy under the Knife:Experimentation and Emotion in Late Victorian Medicine

Abstract

Though written in 1858, some 15 years before the debate over animal experimentation became widespread in Britain, French offers this passage as a reliable appraisal of the Victorian lay public, and indeed as an indictment of its sentimental and ultimately futile resistance to the advance of medical science. Other commentators on the vivisection debates, and on scientific medicine more generally, have followed suit in their transparent reading of historical sources concerning the inner feelings of medical experimenters and their critics.2 The persuasiveness of such accounts is perhaps due to the ultimate victory of the ‘laboratory revolution in medicine’ and to the model of emotions that emerged from the laboratory setting towards the end of the nineteenth century. Recent ‘emotional histories’, now unfolding on an ambitious scale, indicate the extent to which neurophysiologies and evolutionary psychologies of feeling have flourished sufficiently to provide culturalhistorians with their objects of study, as it were, ready-made from the laboratory.3 But how did modern bio-medicine become the authoritative domain in which emotions could be studied, defined, or even transformed? In addressing this question, I want to re-examine the Victorian controversy over vivisection as a debate about the nature of feelings and their place in medical practice.