A01=Rebecca Herzig
American life
American science
american studies
Author_Rebecca Herzig
barbarians
careers
Category=PDX
Civil War
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
ethical research
ethics
explorers
freedom
Gilded Age
history
history of medicine
history of nursing
jobs
lethal research
martyrs
medical history
medical research
medical studies
medicine and nursing
non-fiction
nonfiction
Progressive Era
race
racial politics
research
researchers
rutgers
rutgers university
rutgers university press
science of suffering
scientists
self-expermientation
self-sacrifice
slavery
transnational politics
U.S. history
united states history
work
World War I
WWI
Product details
- ISBN 9780813539515
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2006
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From gruesome self-experimentation to exhausting theoretical calculations, stories abound of scientists willfully surrendering health, well-being, and personal interests for the sake of their work. What accounts for the prevalence of this coupling of knowledge and pain-and for the peculiar assumption that science requires such suffering? In this lucid and absorbing history, Rebecca M. Herzig explores the rise of an ethic of "self-sacrifice" in American science. Delving into some of the more bewildering practices of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, she describes when and how science-the supposed standard of all things judicious and disinterested-came to rely on an enthralled investigator willing to embrace toil, danger, and even lethal dismemberment. With attention to shifting racial, sexual, and transnational politics, Herzig examines the suffering scientist as a way to understand the rapid transformation of American life between the Civil War and World War I.
Suffering for Science reveals more than the passion evident in many scientific vocations; it also illuminates a nation's changing understandings of the purposes of suffering, the limits of reason, and the nature of freedom in the aftermath of slavery.
Suffering for Science reveals more than the passion evident in many scientific vocations; it also illuminates a nation's changing understandings of the purposes of suffering, the limits of reason, and the nature of freedom in the aftermath of slavery.
Rebecca M. Herzig teaches in the Program in Women and Gender Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
