Description

Animal rights and medical ethics may seem to be
fairly recent, unrelated controversies. However, in
the late nineteenth-century, literature that
critiqued science was fueled by the vivisection
controversy. Vivisection, the method of
experimentation on living animals that propelled
medicine from an art of observation to a science of
experimentation, becomes complicated by its
connection to eugenics, gender and procreative
issues, and for its role in revisiting Darwinian
debates about the relationship between human and
non-human animals. The ethical issues raised in
several late-Victorian novels are explored from a
Darwinian perspective, and the book ends with an
analysis of Octavia E. Butler s twentieth-century
novels to illustrate the current relevance of these
cultural debates. This text should be useful for
academics, scholars, and students of Victorian
literature, history, culture, and/or science; those
interested in the work of Charles Darwin and the
relationships between human and non-human animals;
science fiction enthusiasts; and all who are
fascinated by the rapidly changing field of medical
and scientific technology.