Rob Boddice | Tampere University (original) (raw)

Books by Rob Boddice

Polity Press, 2023

Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own... more Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a papercut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific.

Sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches and disparate languages to tackle the thorniest challenges in pain research. He explores the shifting meaning-making processes that produce painful experiences, expanding the world of pain to take seriously the relationship between pain’s physicality and social and emotional suffering. Ranging from antiquity to the present and taking in pain knowledge and pain experiences from around the world, his tale encompasses not only injury, but also grief, exclusion, chronic pain, and trauma, and reveals how knowledge claims about pain occupy what pain is like.

Innovative and compassionate in equal measure, Knowing Pain puts forward an original pain agenda that is essential reading for those interested in the history of emotions, senses, and experience, for medical researchers and practitioners, and for anyone who has known pain.

Routledge, 2023

Forthcoming. 4 volume set. This collection pieces together a wealth of material in order to ge... more Forthcoming. 4 volume set.

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.
The collection hinges on an etymological overlap, between experiment, expertise and experience, which all emphasise the practical component of scientific discovery: ex – out of, periri – to go through. Expertise is the product of experiment: it comes out of having undergone something. Experience captures the whole process, tying knowledge to activity. This overlap is essentially definitive of the culture of scientific knowledge production in this period, which nevertheless underwent extraordinary changes along ethical, professional, theoretical, practical, intellectual, social and technological lines. The sources presented here aim to capture those shifts and to emphasise the extent to which the experimental impetus necessitated innovation not only from the point of view of technique, but also in the ways knowledge bearers defined their value, and with it the value of knowledge itself.
The first three volumes are divided according to moral themes within medicine and science. They represent three dominant notes within the culture of knowledge production that capture the moral/emotional/social justification for the making of expertise through experiment. The first 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. The second 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. Volume three 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.
If the first three volumes highlight notes of dissent to the self-justification of scientific lives, the fourth 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.
The scientific and medical cultures included here are diverse, beginning with Jenner’s vaccination experiments in the 1790s and ending with the vast uncontrolled medical experiment afforded by the First World War. In between, there are anatomists, physiologists, toxicologists, neurologists, surgeons, biometrists, eugenicists, Darwinists (including Darwin himself), psychologists and physicians, among others. They are, in some sense, all connected by the moral economies in which they operated. The sources compiled here should make clear the extent to which they shared the experience of becoming and being experts

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and se... more This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions.

Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Emotion and Experience in the History of Medicine: Elaborating A Theory and Seeking A Method, Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer

Lived Epidemic
Commentary

1. Feeling the Dis-Ease of Ebola: An Invisible War, Emmanuel King Urey-Yarkpawolo
2. Ebola Wahala: Breaching Experiments in a Sierra Leonean Border Town, Luisa Enria and Angus Fayia Tengbeh
3. History before Corona: Memory, Experience, and Emotions, Bettina Hitzer

Datafication and Knowledge Production
Commentary

4. The Binary Logic of Emotion in the Sensorium of Virtual Health: The Case of Happify, Kirsten Ostherr
5. Third Person: Narrating Dis-Ease and Knowledge in Psychiatric Case Histories, Marietta Meier

Dis-ease Narratives: Making and Listening
Commentary

6. Feeling (and Falling) Ill: Finding a Language of Illness, Franziska Gygax
7. Beyond Symptomology: Listening to How Palestinians Conceive of their own Suffering and Well-being, Heidi Morrison

Expertise, Authority, Emotion
Commentary

8. Forensic Sense: Sexual Violence, Medical Professionals, and the Senses, Joanna Bourke
9. The Concept of Leidensdruck in West-German Criminal Therapy, 1960-85, Marcel Streng

Construction and Contingency of Experience
Commentary

10. The Efficacy of Arcadia: Constructing Emotions of Nature in the Pained Body through Landscape Imagery, c.1945-Present, Brenda Lynn Edgar
11. 'Fashionable' Diseases in Georgian Britain: Medical Theory, Cultural Meanings and Lived Experience, James Kennaway

Material, Objects, Feelings
Commentary

12. From a Patient's Point of View: A Sensual-Perceptual Approach to Bed Treatment, Monika Ankele
13. Feeling Penfield, Annmarie Adams

Select Bibliography
Index

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Full abstract and book outline in the attached file

Cambridge University Press Elements, 2020

FREE to download until October 2, 2020. Co-authored with Mark M Smith: Emotion, Sense, Experience... more FREE to download until October 2, 2020. Co-authored with Mark M Smith: Emotion, Sense, Experience is a short, pointed, engaging book calling on historians of emotions and historians of the senses to partake in serious and sustained dialogue. The book outlines the deep, if largely unacknowledged, genealogy of historical writing, insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. We claim that histories of emotions and the senses should be written in tandem, not only in an effort to dilute some of the shortcomings of the respective fields as they are currently conceived and written but, more importantly, to grant historians access to a new way of understanding historical experience generally. Such a project necessarily opens up the question of the object of historical enquiry – the human being – and points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration. As the neurosciences turn toward the social and the cultural, so historians might usefully turn towards the neurosciences. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we radically re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and placing it squarely under the purview of the humanities.

WBG Theiss, 2020

German translation of "A History of Feelings".

The history of emotions, now a major focus in the discipline of history, has taken off in the las... more The history of emotions, now a major focus in the discipline of history, has taken off in the last decade. Still, one could be forgiven for wondering where the history of emotions is. Despite the great explosion of work being produced by historians on feelings, passions, emotions and sentiments, few have attempted general coverage, and none have attempted a narrative from antiquity to the present, to unfold a story of the history of emotions across historical time. This book brings together for the first time a messy history of feelings over the extremely longue durée. It seeks to exemplify how to do a history of emotions in the broadest possible strokes. It is not a close academic study of a small moment or a single place, but an attempt at a narrative of affective life in the epic mode. The book rejects a universal theory of the emotions and adopts a bio-cultural approach to argue that how we feel is the dynamic product of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space. Emotional encounters and individual experiences alike are explained in historical and cultural context to rehabilitate the unsaid – the gestural, affective and experiential – of traditional historical narratives.

Contents:
Introduction: Feeling for History
1. Archaic and Classical Passions:
Godlike Menace,
Fear and Cosmic Things,
Shame and Human Things,
Practices of ‘Happiness’.
2. Rhetorical and Bodily Feelings:
Summoning Anger,
In A Bloody Temper,
Blood and Gore: A Feast for the Eyes,
Sense, Sin and the Fear that Endures Forever.
3. Motions and Machinations:
A Vision of Divine Love,
Love and Power at Court,
I Move Therefore I Am,
The Map of Tender.
4. The Age of Unreason:
The End of Sorrow,
Paine and Happiness,
One of the Calmest Acts of Reason,
In a Sad, Sad State of Decomposition.
5. Senselessness and Insensibility:
Four Stages of Cruelty,
Insignificant Grimaces,
Aequanimitas, or the End of Sympathy.
6. The Ministry of Happiness:
Uniform Happiness,
The Happiness Agenda,
Politicking Happiness,
Return to Aristotle.
Conclusion: The Value of Experience

"The history of emotions" is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, an... more "The history of emotions" is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry. Historians of emotion borrow heavily from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and stake out a claim that emotions have a past and change over time. This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions, discussing how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Providing a narrative of historical emotions concepts, the book is the go-to handbook for understanding the problems of interpreting historical experience, collating and evaluating all the principal methodological tools generated and used by historians of emotion. It also lays out an historiographical map of emotions history research in the past and present, and sets the agenda for the future of the history of emotions. Chiefly centring on the rapprochement of the humanities and the neurosciences, the book proposes a way forward in which disciplinary lines become blurred. Addressing criticism from both within and without the discipline of history, "The history of emotions" offers a rigorous defence of this new approach, demonstrating its potential to lie at the centre of historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for our general understanding of the human brain and the meaning of human experience.

Contents
Introduction
1. Historians and Emotions
2. Words and Concepts
3. Communities, Regimes and Styles
4. Power, Politics and Violence
5. Practice and Expression
6. Experience, Senses and the Brain
7. Spaces, Places and Objects
8. Morality
Conclusion

Charles Darwin believed that by honing their mental powers, the most advanced minds would be able... more Charles Darwin believed that by honing their mental powers, the most advanced minds would be able to see farther, to a truer feeling and practice of sympathy. Science of Sympathy charts the formation of a new emotional and moral regime among the first generation of Darwinists. The publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871 redefined the role of sympathy in the formation of civilisation. This instinctive power acted as social glue. It was the well-spring of morality, with its roots in natural selection. An evolutionary understanding of sympathy could not only explain how morality had developed, but could also plot a future course for civilisation. Central to Darwin’s argument was the idea that, among the most civilised, the natural development of sympathy was aided and abetted by public opinion, formed and influenced by the intellectual capacities of society’s best men. Darwin provided a prescription for a conscious domestication of the power of sympathy. This book analyses the various efforts around the turn of the twentieth century to make this a reality.

Framed by the intellectual and methodological innovations of the burgeoning field of the history of emotions, Science of Sympathy re-contextualises the struggle between science and religion at the end of the nineteenth century as a contest between emotional regimes. On the one hand, the culture of ‘common compassion’ lauded the tender mercies of humanity that had been instilled by the hand of God. The compassionate conscience undergirded Victorian notions of charity and gave political weight to popular causes, such as stamping out the suffering associated with poverty, and the prevention of cruelty to animals. To the proponents of mercy, the rising generation of men following in Darwin’s footsteps appeared to be monstrous. The common practice and tradition of charitable work was defined by giving succour to the weak. It seemed to be threatened by an amoral order that stressed the survival of the fittest. Where was the sympathy in Darwinism?

These criticisms were particularly levelled at physiologists, whose practice depended on vivisection, and whose intellectual rationale for doing so depended on Darwinism. To these men, the complaints of anti-vivisectionists were misplaced humanity and sentimentalism. Medical scientists used the Darwinian idea of putting sympathetic instincts under rational control to harden themselves against the aesthetically unnerving procedures of the laboratory. Darwin gave moral justification to this process, both intellectually and personally. The habituation of the surgeon to the sight of blood had long-since been held up as a sign of moral corruption. Now, for the first time, medical scientists were embracing this temporary callousness as a means to the attainment of a higher form of sympathy, a greater good. Armed with an a priori moral and intellectual justification for their work, they strove to embody – to really feel – sympathetic as they went about their operations.

Not everybody could do it. Central to this book’s innovative take on the conversion of Darwin’s ideas into affective scientific practices is an analysis of emotive failure. Science of Sympathy explores the extent to which committed Darwinists came up short in their attempts truly to live according to the principles they espoused, much to their own disappointment. T.H. Huxley’s unswerving support for vivisection, for example, could not conquer the nausea that prevented him from doing it himself. Moreover, as more and more men of science referred to evolutionary understandings of sympathy to explain and justify what they did, it became clear that a plurality of sympathies had been spawned in Darwin’s name, and by no means were they consistent. To examine these the book turns to more general questions of public health, and of vaccination and eugenics in particular.

Compulsory vaccination against smallpox had been held up by Darwin as a prime example of the extension of sympathy to all in the name of the common good. In the teeth of fierce opposition from anti-vaccinists, Darwin and Huxley saw clearly that the apparent curtailment of individual liberty and the privacy of the family was necessary if the nation’s children as a whole were to be spared the speckled monster of disease. But arguing with equal force, and armed with the same theoretical tools, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace lined up against them, even while they did not agree with each other. Brandishing their own notions of the evolution of sympathy and the role of natural selection among the civilised, the vaccination question sharply focused the debate about evolutionary ethics.

The beginnings of the eugenics movement made that focus all the more acute. Despite the spilling of much ink on the history of eugenics, it has so far gone unrecognised that the moral and emotional foundation for eugenics in England rested on an interpretation of the sympathy outlined in the Descent of Man. Science of Sympathy analyses for the first time Francis Galton and Karl Pearson’s attempts to narrow the Darwinian vision. Darwin had observed that the universal extension of sympathy would ultimately preserve the weak, who would in turn bring down civilisation. Eugenics aimed to prevent this. Sympathy would be reserved for the strong and ‘fit’ and withheld from the ‘unfit’. The origins and purpose of philanthropy, humanity and love would be re-imagined in a new religion, the duties of which would be grounded in eugenic breeding. Galton and Pearson saw themselves forming a new ‘priesthood’ of moral guardians who would be fitted for their work through their scientific ‘character’, namely, the capacity to subject sympathy to cold calculation.

Science of Sympathy therefore culminates in an analysis of the scientific self, of the dynamic process of reinforcing feelings through practice, and of extolling the virtues of new practices according to the feelings they inspired. Viewed as a loose collective, these scientists formed a moral economy that performed new ethics, reconceptualised obligations, and executed new duties. Their practices of sympathy may seem to us bizarre at best, or dangerous and dystopian at worst, but their influence on our present has been enormous.

Contents:
1. Emotions, Morals, Practices
2. Sympathy for a Devil’s Chaplain
3. Common Compassion and the Mad Scientist
4. Sympathy as Callousness? Physiology and Vivisection
5. Sympathy, Liberty, and Compulsion: Vaccination
6. Sympathetic Selection: Eugenics
7. Conclusion: Scientism and Practice

Edward Jenner is a giant of modern medicine. Throughout history, smallpox had plagued humanit... more Edward Jenner is a giant of modern medicine.

Throughout history, smallpox had plagued humanity with disfigurement, blindness, and death. It was an incurable blight, the suffering of which Jenner helped bring to an end.

Surmising from the immunity of milkmaids that cowpox might be some defence against the ravages of smallpox, in 1796 he took some of the matter from a human case of cowpox and inserted it into the arms of a young boy. To test this, the first human-to-human vaccination, he subsequently inoculated the boy with smallpox itself, and found him to be immune from the disease.

In 1979 smallpox was declared extinct.

This is the story of Jenner’s life, his medical vision, and his profound legacy. That legacy encompasses revolutions in medical experimentation, public health provision, and the prevention of other diseases, from anthrax to measles.

Pain and Emotion in Modern History is a rich exploration of the affective expression of pain, the... more Pain and Emotion in Modern History is a rich exploration of the affective expression of pain, the emotional experience of pain, and the experience of others’ pain as pain. What pains have been considered historically valid? What pains were invalid? This book sets a stark agenda for a new history of pain that foregrounds pain’s emotional content. It also sends a message to pain specialists to take a reflexive approach to pain in the present. The purpose is not to redefine pain, but to lay bare its politics, ever changing and more or less subtle, but ever present and always to someone’s disadvantage.

Anthropocentrism can be a charge of human chauvinism, yet it can also be an acknowledgement of th... more Anthropocentrism can be a charge of human chauvinism, yet it can also be an acknowledgement of the boundaries of human consciousness; it is in tension with nature, the environment and nonhuman animals; and it is in apparent contrast to other-worldly cosmologies, religions and philosophies. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans’ understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. It influences our ethics, our politics, and the moral status of others, yet how thoroughly is the concept and its history understood?

This collection of essays explores the assumptions behind the label ‘anthropocentrism’, specifically aiming critically to enquire into presuppositions about the meaning of ‘human’. The book looks fundamentally to understand what is anthropos in anthropocentrism. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, tackling the question of whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, the collection examines the potential scope for objective, ‘ejective’, empathetic, or ‘Other’ views that genuinely, and not merely rhetorically, trump anthropocentrism. Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, the essays explore the history of anthropocentric ideas and their relation to a number of issues of pressing contemporary concern. These include the implications of speciesism and anthropocentrism for nonhuman animals; the question of humanity’s role in the environment and ecological change; religious rhetoric and spiritual crisis; and the human-centred ‘problems’ extant in society and culture.

The book is organised into four sections, exploring, respectively: epistemological and ontological enquiries into anthropocentrism – an intellectual exploration of the history of the idea; anthropocentrism and religion, society and culture in historical and theoretical context; speciesism and the animal subject, exploring the potential (or lack thereof) for ‘other’ alternatives to anthropocentrism with regard to non-human animals; and environment and technology, investigating the extent to which the earth’s climate, nature more generally, and the instruments of human existence were/are more or less problematically anthropocentric. These are prefaced by a synthetic introduction, exploring the plurality of sites and meanings for anthropocentrism, and giving the collection its organising principle.

Until now, works dealing with anthropocentrism have tended to place it in limited context, as it relates to any one of the above mentioned themes. This book’s importance lies in its bringing together of these different contexts, which in turn fosters a richer understanding of the meaning(s) of anthropocentrism. Situated in one place, scholars from different specialisations make manifest the protean nature of the concept, leading to an enriched and deeply critical awareness of contemporary uses of anthropocentrism, be it as a justification for action, or as an accusation of chauvinism.

Topics cover a broad range of places, people and periods. The collection as a whole will serve as a course text for classes in intellectual history or the history of philosophy, as well as being essential reading in animal studies, environmental studies, theology and philosophy.

This book details the history of long-running debates on the question of the moral status of anim... more This book details the history of long-running debates on the question of the moral status of animals in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. The emergence of animals as subjects worthy of ethical consideration is traced back to philosophical ideas dating to antiquity, which gained renewed popularity in the early eighteenth century. The sense of urgency with which the subject was taken up can be explained by a critical need to understand and to account for human pre-eminence in the world. From these beginnings, the book argues that as the movement to protect animals from cruelty gathered pace, it never lost its essentially anthropocentric outlook. Closely examining questions of animal pain and suffering, the concepts of cruelty and of kinship, and the social implications of newly codified and legally enforced configurations of human-animal relations, this study comprehensively documents the changing place of animals in human life. It will appeal to scholars and students of the emerging field of animal studies who specialise in history, philosophy, gender studies, anthropology and politics, as well as to British historians in general.

Papers by Rob Boddice

History of the Human Sciences, 2020

Athenaeum Review, 2019

An historian's adventures in the land of emotion research

Developmental Psychology, 2019

This commentary critically assesses the importance and limitations of bioconstructionist research... more This commentary critically assesses the importance and limitations of bioconstructionist research on emotional development within the discipline of psychology, broadly conceived, finding that it depends upon theories and methodologies concerning the study of culture that the humanities can provide. The established field of the history of emotions is introduced as a means of complicating bioconstruction by highlighting the contingency of the world in which emotional development takes place. Once the developing brain-body is understood to be historically specific, new questions emerge, old debates (especially about universality) are settled, and the pathway towards interdisciplinary collaboration on the question of experience opens up.

The pursuit of the history of experience has been emboldened in the last ten years by a certain s... more The pursuit of the history of experience has been emboldened in the last ten years by a certain strand of neuroscientific research that attests to the contingency and the mutability of experience. This chapter lays out the intellectual and scientific justifications for neurohistory, showing both where it has come from and where it might go, and addressing along the way the refinements that have taken place in its first years of existence. Of necessity, it dwells on the neuroscientific research that has made neurohistory possible, which might be unfamiliar to the vast majority of historians. But this diversion should not be off-putting. It is included to provide neurohistory’s guiding compass, not because historians themselves have to be particularly literate in neuroscience, since neurohistory is not, in the estimation of this chapter, a particularly brain-centred approach to the past. Rather, it is an approach to the past that is cognisant of the evidence for brain plasticity in human development, and of the ways in which context is instrumental in the construction of experience, at a neurochemical level. Neurohistory emphasises the dynamic relationship among context, brain and experience that makes individual or group perceptions not mere points of view or subjective perspectives on an objective reality, but rather reliable statements of reality as it was experienced. Neurohistorians underwrite social construction with a demonstrable relationship between context and brain. The chapter argues that these things change the register of archival interpretation, from metaphor to literalism.

Edward Jenner asserted that modern diseases arose from a closeness to animals that was not intend... more Edward Jenner asserted that modern diseases arose from a closeness to animals that was not intended by nature. Jenner became famous for his successful method of preventing smallpox. The original “vaccine” was named after the cow from which it came. But despite the success of Jenner’s method, many of his critics were concerned about the mid- and long-term effects of vaccination: they feared that to be vaccinated was to become animal. Even worse, this communion with beastly matter was seen as a kind of degenerate lust, a form of bestiality and monstrous reproduction, which would bring forth a “modern chimera.” For some, cowpox vaccination was a sordid and unholy communion, the embodiment of an immoral trinity of animality, bestiality, and sexually transmitted disease.

The history of emotions promises to unlock new historical narratives that tell us how emotions ar... more The history of emotions promises to unlock new historical narratives that tell us how emotions are made, how they change over time and how they make history. Historians of emotions are engaged in the development and application of new tools in order to uncover previously unexplored histories of how the past was experienced: what it felt like to be there. They ask how those feelings were connected to particular institutions, rituals and bodily practices, pointing to novel possibilities for histories of the contextually situated body and mind. As such, the history of emotions is actively engaged with other disciplines –anthropology, psychology and neuroscience in particular –and is at the centre of innovative developments of a biocultural understanding of the human. This chapter argues for the enduring value of some of the early insights, often overlooked, of the discipline of psychology and their applicability to a challenging historiographical future that is fully engaged with the social neurosciences.

Polity Press, 2023

Routledge, 2023

Forthcoming. 4 volume set. This collection pieces together a wealth of material in order to ge... more Forthcoming. 4 volume set.

Introduction
Emotion and Experience in the History of Medicine: Elaborating A Theory and Seeking A Method, Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer

Lived Epidemic
Commentary

Datafication and Knowledge Production
Commentary

4. The Binary Logic of Emotion in the Sensorium of Virtual Health: The Case of Happify, Kirsten Ostherr
5. Third Person: Narrating Dis-Ease and Knowledge in Psychiatric Case Histories, Marietta Meier

Dis-ease Narratives: Making and Listening
Commentary

6. Feeling (and Falling) Ill: Finding a Language of Illness, Franziska Gygax
7. Beyond Symptomology: Listening to How Palestinians Conceive of their own Suffering and Well-being, Heidi Morrison

Expertise, Authority, Emotion
Commentary

8. Forensic Sense: Sexual Violence, Medical Professionals, and the Senses, Joanna Bourke
9. The Concept of Leidensdruck in West-German Criminal Therapy, 1960-85, Marcel Streng

Construction and Contingency of Experience
Commentary

Material, Objects, Feelings
Commentary

12. From a Patient's Point of View: A Sensual-Perceptual Approach to Bed Treatment, Monika Ankele
13. Feeling Penfield, Annmarie Adams

Select Bibliography
Index

Cambridge University Press, 2021

Full abstract and book outline in the attached file

Cambridge University Press Elements, 2020

WBG Theiss, 2020

German translation of "A History of Feelings".

Edward Jenner is a giant of modern medicine. Throughout history, smallpox had plagued humanit... more Edward Jenner is a giant of modern medicine.

Throughout history, smallpox had plagued humanity with disfigurement, blindness, and death. It was an incurable blight, the suffering of which Jenner helped bring to an end.

In 1979 smallpox was declared extinct.

History of the Human Sciences, 2020

Athenaeum Review, 2019

An historian's adventures in the land of emotion research

Developmental Psychology, 2019

Nineteenth Century Contexts, 2017

First 50 uses of the link get full access

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2017

This article briefly appraises the state of the art in the history of emotions, looking to its th... more This article briefly appraises the state of the art in the history of emotions, looking to its theoretical and methodological underpinnings and some of the notable scholarship in the contemporary field. The predominant focus, however, lies on the future direction of the history of emotions, based on a convergence of the humanities and neurosciences, and according to important observations about the biocultural status of human beings. While the article stops short of exhorting historians to become competent neuroscientists themselves, it does demand that historians of emotions take note of the implications of social neuroscientific research in particular, with a view to capturing the potential of the emotions to unlock the history of experience, and with a mind to unlocking the political importance of work in this area, namely, the shifting ground of what it means -how it feels- to be human.

Este artículo evalúa el estado del arte en la historia de las emociones, considerando tanto sus fundamentos teóricos como metodológicos y algunos de los estudios contemporáneos más notables en este campo. Sin embargo, el enfoque predominante reside en la dirección que tomará la historia de las emociones en el futuro, con base en la convergencia de las humanidades y las neurociencias, y de acuerdo con importantes observaciones acerca del estatus biocultural de los seres humanos. Aunque este artículo no llega a exhortar a los historiadores a convertirse en neurocientíficos competentes, sí exige que los historiadores de la emociones tomen nota de las implicaciones de la investigación neurocientífica social en particular, con miras a captar el potencial de las emociones para decifrar la historia de la experiencia, y con el propósito de entender la importancia política del trabajo en esta área, a saber, el terreno cambiante de lo que significa -de lo que se siente- ser humano.

Este artigo avalia o estado da arte na história das emoções considerando tanto seus fundamentos teóricos quanto metodológicos, e alguns dos estudos contemporâneos mais notáveis nesse campo. Entretanto, o enfoque predominante reside na direção que tomará a história das emoções no futuro, com base na convergência das humanidades e das neurociências, e de acordo com as observações sobre o estado biocultural dos seres humanos. Este artigo não pretende convencer os historiadores a converter-se em neurocientistas, mas pede que os historiadores das emoções atentem para as implicações da pesquisa neurocientífica, a social em especial, com o objetivo de captar o potencial das emoções para decifrar a história da experiência, e com o propósito de entender a importância política do trabalho nessa área, especialmente o terreno cambiante do que significa -do que se sente- ser humano.

Journal of Social History, 2017

In this article we analyze the profound impact of Peter Stearns’s pioneering work on the history ... more In this article we analyze the profound impact of Peter Stearns’s pioneering work on the history of emotions over more than three decades. Stearns has influenced both the theory and the methodology of emotions historians, as well as providing a large body of work that empirically documents emotional change over time. In our assessment of Stearns’s contribution, we emphasize the ongoing political importance and scholarly relevance of this work, particularly as it pertains to the history of childhood and to current concerns with emotional control in American society. We assess the lasting significance of Stearns’s tackling of the nature-nurture debate, the evolution of his concept of “emotionology,” and the overwhelming importance of Stearns’s assertion that the study of emotions was not the exclusive domain of scientists but fair game for historians as well.

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Fears about vaccination are tenacious, despite an overwhelming weight of evidence in favour of im... more Fears about vaccination are tenacious, despite an overwhelming weight of evidence in favour of immunization and despite the potentially dangerous consequences of falling rates of immunity against once common diseases. Drawing on recent developments in the history of emotions and an extensive historiography on the history of vaccination, this article argues that fear of vaccination has become culturally idiomatic and highly resistant to fact-based education campaigns. A role is envisaged for historians to present, in accessible media, narratives of successful public-health campaigns and, at the same time, to demonstrate the contextual underpinnings of social fear in order to allay such fears in the present.

Reviews in History, Apr 2015

Journal of Social History, 2015

Double review in the Journal of Social History.

Social History of Medicine

Anglo-German Scholarly Relations in the Long Nineteenth Century, Feb 2014

Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Mar 2014

This essay explores the interplay of different species of compassion with regard to physiological... more This essay explores the interplay of different species of compassion with regard to physiological practices in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the lexicon from which ideals of late-Victorian compassion were formed, it illustrates their contested nature, demonstrating how physiologists developed their own concepts of compassion based on the theories of Darwin and Spencer. Within this purview, the essay examines the historical specificity of antivivisectionist compassion as well as ways in which pain in the laboratory was conceptualized, experienced, and managed ethically.

Este artículo evalúa el estado del arte en la historia de las emociones, considerando tanto sus fundamentos teóricos como metodológicos y algunos de los estudios contemporáneos más notables en este campo. Sin embargo, el enfoque predominante reside en la dirección que tomará la historia de las emociones en el futuro, con base en la convergencia de las humanidades y las neurociencias, y de acuerdo con importantes observaciones acerca del estatus biocultural de los seres humanos. Aunque este artículo no llega a exhortar a los historiadores
a convertirse en neurocientíficos competentes, sí exige que los historiadores de la emociones tomen nota de las implicaciones de la investigación neurocientífica social en particular, con miras a captar el potencial de las emociones para decifrar la historia de la experiencia, y con el propósito de entender la importancia política del trabajo en esta
área, a saber, el terreno cambiante de lo que significa —de lo que se siente— ser humano.