A Value to Suffering

Rebecca Herzig's Suffering for Science offers a carefully argued analysis of how nineteenth-century scientists made abstract notions of suffering and truth matter in the practice of experimentation. This sparklingly original study provides a lens through which scholars of American studies can examine the ways in which gender, compensation, religion, and industry were structured in relation to a broader practice that came to be unified under the rubric of science.

This unique and highly readable study alone would be worth the price of the book. But it also aims incisively for the jugular of both American studies and science studies and toward an analysis of the value systems that underpin American endeavor more generally. In this sense, big questions pulse through this narrative; as a history, the book asks us to stretch toward something grander, toward questions that overflow the subjects through which they are studied. Thus the reader is asked to consider what life is and how material human bodies relate to life and truth, relate to the values we assign to human activity. Herzig's study presents these questions through science, but similar questions could be posed in relation to any activity that is understood to be "worth" (to someone) a material, bodily cost, from manual labor to professional sport. These are places toward which Marxist theories of value, as well as recent work in disability studies, struggle, and Herzig's work provides a welcome new avenue for analysis. In one of the rare grand claims—and one that Herzig realizes—she writes: "At stake . . . is nothing less than the status of being human: the nature of individual freedom, the purpose of suffering, and the possibilities for real and lasting progress" (15).

At a time when much scholarly work approaches suffering as an ethical bedrock, as ineluctably "bad" and to be avoided, Herzig illuminates the ways in which suffering too is a multidimensional ethical pawn that has been used in the making of value and truth claims. Thus, it is not only the depth of the historical knowledge that she brings to the questions that make this book burn with relevance, but the strikingly original methods for accessing analytic black boxes, such as suffering and pain, that allow us to get beyond the tired questions of how suffering is distributed and toward consideration of how suffering is defined, accepted, welcomed, debated, constituted, borne, and valued.

The introduction lucidly outlines the series of questions that are pursued in the book. Primarily, why was it that starting in the 1870s, scientists were willing to suffer and die for science, to sacrifice their very bodies in the cause of truth seeking? Science, for example, claimed in 1883, that "higher than all" science must "be devoted to the truth. It must cheerfully undertake the severest labor to secure it, and must deem no sacrifice too great in order to preserve it" (3). And so not only did the advancement of science seem by definition to require self-sacrifice, but scientists were those who were uniquely both willing and able to take on this suffering.

This question spawns a series of others: To what extent was the body its own experimental tool? How did suffering come to be understood as noble? How did sacrifice enter the languages of science and masculinity? Moreover, whose suffering counted, why, and for what? What were the implications of this sacrificial subject that made its way through the early institutionalization of science in the United States? In answering these questions, Suffering for Science traces the conditions in which late-nineteenth-century Americans came to characterize science and scientists. These characterizations, Herzig argues, depended on certain notions of property and personhood, on received contradictions of the modern subject, and on the influence of Protestant doctrines of salvation. But more fundamentally, any concept of sacrifice requires the theorist to examine concepts of exchange. By definition, sacrifice requires an uncompensated loss, an unrestricted offering, and analysis of these issues...