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. Read more Read less