This volume foregrounds humanity (in the sense of compassion or sympathy), which often supplied the motivation for medical experiment and scientific innovation. Though the results of experiments could not be known in advance, often the stated goal was the reduction of suffering, the cure of disease, or the easement of life. 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 is divided according to moral themes within medicine and science. The sources represent dominant notes within the culture of knowledge production that capture the moral/emotional/social justification for the making of expertise through experiment. This volume focuses on curiosity, given as the scientist’s chief motivating factor for the finding of new facts, and as an essential character trait for anyone entering the scientific life. It is also the source of controversy and criticism, since curiosity alone increasingly looked amoral at best and immoral at worst, as the nineteenth century wore on.

This volume showcases doubt from within the scientific community itself. These sources dwell upon the moments at which ideas became challenged, when facts were revealed to be fiction, and when knowns reverted to unknowns. But the focus is not the ideas and facts themselves, but on the ways in which scientists adjusted themselves to new landscapes of uncertainty in their particular cultural and professional practices.

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.

This collection pieces together a wealth of material in order to get inside the experience of scientific practice in the long nineteenth century. It aims to reach, or perhaps to facilitate, an understanding of the ways in which the value of scientific knowledge was produced, lived and challenged. The new turn to the history of experience suggests a logic to the compilation of material that is completely original: the sources are not selected according to the historical success of an idea or experiment, but for the ways in which scientific endeavour loaded knowledge claims with political or moral value, coupled with attendant practical justifications. Thus, 'bad ideas' sit alongside 'good'; now discountenanced practices take their place among the revered. In sum, they reveal an experimental culture that was not merely orientated toward cold knowledge or intellectual output, but defined by shifting sets of affective practices and procedures and the making of expertise out of the lived experience of doing science.

In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He 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.