The science of sympathy : morality, evolution, and Victorian civilization / Rob Boddice.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Emotions, morals, practices -- Sympathy for a devil's chaplain -- Common compassion and the mad scientist -- Sympathy as callousness? physiology and vivisection -- Sympathy, liberty, and compulsion: vaccination -- Sympathetic selection: eugenics -- Scientism and practice.

Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

In his 'Descent of Man', Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in civilized 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 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. Combining the history of emotions, the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of morality, Boddice shows how specific interpretations of Darwinism sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy.

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