Suffering For Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America

"From stories of gruesome self-experimentation to descriptions of exhausting theoretical calculations, examples abound of scientists willingly surrendering their personal well-being for the sake of their work. What accounts for the prevalence of this coupling of knowledge and pain - for the peculiar assumption that science requires suffering?"

"In this lucid and absorbing history, Rebecca M. Herzig examines 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 endure toil, pain, and even lethal danger. With attention to the shifting politics of race, sex, and nationhood, Herzig uses the suffering scientist as a novel lens through which to view 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."--Jacket.